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Not the New Perspective

FRANCIS WATSON

An unpublished paper delivered at the British New Testament Conference,

Manchester, September 2001

Those of us with some experience of academic life may perhaps recognize the following scenario. You receive an invitation to deliver a paper at a conference or seminar. It's pleasant to find that someone out there thinks you may have something worthwhile to say, so you accept. A little while later, you receive a second, very polite request. We're most grateful to you for your willingness to present a paper, but could you now give us a title? At this point, you discover that the initial invitation, which had seemed an act of pure grace, also entails a demand for works. It's not enough just to accept it, you now have to do something to demonstrate your acceptance. Well, you have a few vague ideas of the kind of thing you might want to speak about in six or twelve months time, some kind of spin-off from current research probably, so you hastily concoct some sort of title and turn your attention back to the other twenty-seven email messages that have arrived that morning. Some time later, the conference programme arrives. Your name is prominently displayed on it, but so too is that title: an unpleasant reminder that a paper plausibly related to that title must one day be delivered, and that the initial invitation of grace is entirely compatible with a final judgment according to works. Later still, one or two colleagues or friends begin to show an interest. I was most intrigued by your title, they say. What are you intending to argue? (What they really mean is: I hope you know what you're doing.) So you're made uncomfortably aware that that title may have been an act of folly. But there's now no possibility of repentance. What are you going to argue? That's the question.

When I responded to Dr Longenecker's request for a title, I might have been wiser to offer him a paper entitled, 'Beyond the New Perspective'. 'Beyond' is a most useful word in a title. It acknowledges that the status quo represents a genuine advance, and that there can be no going back on it. But it also appeals to the scholarly sense that we must continue to advance, that any status quo needs to be exposed to new challenges developing in part out of its own insights, and that to remain static is to die - if only of boredom. As Martin Luther himself wrote, commenting on the task of the biblical interpreter:

We must always make progress, and those who think they have apprehended do not know that they are still beginning. Always we are on the way. And what we know and have must be left behind, and what we do not yet know and have must be sought.

Always we are on the way: that's what we believe as scholars and biblical interpreters, and that belief is summed up in the word 'beyond'. We have already moved some way towards the goal of understanding, but we must be willing to continue our journey: that's what 'Beyond the New Perspective' would have said. And who could have objected to that?

In principle, I could announce, at this very moment, that I've changed my title from 'Not the New Perspective' to 'Beyond the New Perspective'. Minor changes to titles of conference papers are not that unusual. In this case, though, such a change would represent a humiliating climb-down. It would suggest that I had rashly committed myself to outright opposition, but had discovered, on mature reflection, that a more nuanced and conciliatory approach would be more expedient. It would suggest that, like the man in the parable, I had foolishly committed myself to building a tower without first sitting down and counting the cost. So I won't be changing my title. 'Beyond the New Perspective' might have been more edifying and illuminating, but, at least for now, 'Not the New Perspective' it must be. Here I stand, I can no other - as someone once said, with more attention to rhetorical effect than to correct English usage.

As my title indicates, I do think that at several important points the so-called 'new perspective on Paul' is simply wrong. It results in readings of Paul's texts that are at least as inadequate as the readings from which it claims to liberate us. Progress in some respects has been accompanied by regress in others. New insight has brought new blindness. Before trying to demonstrate and remedy this, however, I must clarify just what this 'new perspective on Paul' is. The task is not as easy as it sounds, since there are major differences of opinion between the various scholars associated with this 'new perspective', and I want to avoid becoming embroiled in these internal disputes. But I think it's fair to say that the 'new perspective on Paul' represents a broad consensus on five crucial points. Our first task, then, is to survey and analyse these points.

1. The New Perspective on Paul: a preliminary analysis in five points

The five points on which the new perspective seems to have reached a consensus are as follows:

(1) The dominant, post-Reformation tradition of Pauline interpretation is seriously at fault. Taking its starting-point in the Pauline antitheses of faith and works, grace and law, this view claims that Paul's intention is to contrast the Christian understanding of salvation with the Jewish one. On the Christian view, salvation or justification is by grace alone, wholly an act of God, to be acknowledged as such in faith. In contrast to this, the Jewish view holds that it is human obedience to the law that can secure salvation. This opposition between salvation by God's action or by human action is, however, not at all what Paul intended.

(2) So far as they are known to us, the diverse forms of Judaism practised in the period before 70CE do not teach that obedience to the law is the way to salvation. Foundational to what they teach is God's gracious election of Israel. The Jew who observes the law is already within the covenant, the sphere of God's mercy and grace. Law-observance is therefore a means not of getting in but of staying in, in the sense that God's electing action always precedes and grounds the human response required by the law. In addition, it is only very serious breaches of the law that could lead to exclusion from the covenant. Otherwise, it is assumed that God is merciful and forgiving, that repentance is always a possibility, and indeed that provision is made for this within the law itself, in the form of sacrifices for sin. For Judaism, then, salvation is by God's grace alone, although a degree of law-observance is also required. The divine election is absolute and unconditional.

(3) As a minority group within the dominant Hellenistic culture, the Jewish community was concerned above all to preserve its distinctive cultural identity as the elect people of God. Certain characteristic Jewish practices were identified as such by hostile Gentile critics, and came to symbolize and to embody the community's self-differentiation from the wider Gentile world. Among these practices were male circumcision on the eighth day after birth, abstention from pork, observance of the sabbath, and rejection of the gods and images of all other peoples. The symbolic significance of these distinctive practices was confirmed and heightened by Gentile hostility to them, expressed for example in the actions of King Antioches Epiphanes and the Emperor Caligula. To be a Jew was above all to remain loyal to the distinctive identity signified by such practices. Once again, it is a matter of preserving the identity conferred by the divine election of Israel, and not of observing the law in order to earn salvation by one's own efforts.

(4) It was just such a Judaism of divine election and mercy that Paul both affirmed and opposed. He affirmed it in the sense that he leaves God's covenant with Israel intact, denounces incipient Gentile Christian anti-Semitism, and even believes that there will come a day when 'all Israel will be saved'. If, in the heat of controversy, he occasionally said things that imply a negative view of Israel or the law, these do not represent the main trend of his thought. Yet he did oppose his fellow-Jews on one crucial point: the fact that their understanding of the covenant confined the possibility of salvation to the Jewish people. When Paul criticizes the view that righteousness comes 'by works of law', he is criticizing the claim that only members of the Jewish community are truly righteous. When he asserts that righteousness is by faith in Christ, he is asserting that in Christ salvation is open to all people alike, irrespective of their Jewish or Gentile origins. Over against a narrow and exclusive understanding of salvation, Paul asserts a broad and inclusive one. There is perhaps a question about whether he is justified to claim this. Be that as it may, for Paul the antithesis of faith and works has to do with the scope of God's saving action. It has little or nothing to do with the old Protestant contrast of divine grace and human effort; it asserts that God's saving action must be understood inclusively.

(5) This recent rethinking of Paul's relationship with Judaism is a classic example of an interpretative problem that constantly recurs in ever-new forms. Despite two centuries and more of historical-critical scholarship, biblical interpreters continue to misread the biblical texts by anachronistically imposing on them their own theological presuppositions. It is of course pleasant to imagine that one's own beliefs are mirrored back by the biblical texts. Yet, through rigorous application of the historical-critical method, it becomes clear again and again that theologically-oriented biblical interpretation results in serious misreadings of the text. The clash between the 'Lutheran' and the 'new' perspectives on Paul is a case in point. It demonstrates the need for a presuppositionless exegesis - the 'presuppositions' in question being, of course, theological ones.

Here, then, are the five points that make up the 'new perspective' - not the particular version of this held by any individual scholar, but the area of broad although not universal consensus. In order to fix these five points firmly in our memories, I'd like to borrow a well-known mnemonic devise from the Reformed tradition, and adapt it to our purposes. Some of you may have had personal experience of something called 'five point Calvinism', and if so you'll be familiar with the acronym, 'TULIP'. 'TULIP' represents the initial letters of the five great doctrines of the faith that differentiate the orthodox Calvinist from his or her misguided Arminian counterpart. 'T' stands for 'Total depravity': humankind is totally depraved, in the sense that no human faculty remains uncorrupted by sin. 'U' stands for 'Unconditional election': God eternally elects or predestines his saints on the basis of his inscrutable will, and not on the basis of their foreseen merits. 'L' stands for 'Limited atonement': Christ died not for the sins of everyone, which would leave his sacrifice largely ineffective, but for the sins of the elect alone. 'I' stands for 'Irresistible grace': our faith is the product of God's irresistible grace, not of a human capacity for free decision preserved intact in spite of the Fall. 'P' stands for 'the Perseverance of the saints': God's irresistible grace secures his elect against the possibility of apostasy and guarantees their final salvation.

So there you have it: TULIP - Total depravity, Unconditional election, Limited atonement, Irresistible grace, the Perseverance of the saints. Now let's see if we can adapt this tulip to our five point new perspective, genetically modifying it if necessary.

According to the first point, the Lutheran perspective on Paul has got him all wrong. It results in a total travesty of what he meant. So, in place of Total depravity, our own first point is: 'Total travesty'.

According to the second point, the cardinal belief of first century Judaism is the unmerited divine election, God's choice of Israel to be his covenant people. In this case, no modification seems necessary. 'Unconditional election' will do just fine.

According to the third point, this Jewish belief in election comes to expression in a firm allegiance to the marks of difference - circumcision and the rest. 'Limited atonement' isn't quite right here, so I suggest we replace it with 'Loyalty to the law'.

According to the fourth point, Paul is generally affirmative of this Jewish covenant theology, and certainly does not criticize it for any alleged tendency to make salvation dependent on human law-observance. He is, however, critical of its tendency to confine membership of the people of God to the Jewish community; God is, after all, the God of Gentiles also. We will call our fourth point not 'Irresistible grace' but 'Inclusive salvation'.

According to the fifth point, historical-critical study of Paul must rid itself of misreadings stemming from interpreters' prior theological commitments. 'The Perseverance of the saints' is no good here, so we will call our final point, 'Presuppositionless exegesis'.

Total travesty; Unconditional election; Loyalty to the law; Inclusive salvation; Presuppositionless exegesis. These are the five great dogmatic affirmations of the 'new perspective on Paul', the five petals of our genetically modified tulip. I offer this flower to supporters of the new perspective in the sincere hope that they will find it helpful as they seek to propagate their reformed faith, in Sunday Schools and Alpha Courses across the world. But you'll be aware by now that I do not myself share this faith. On the contrary, I intend in what follows to remove each of its five petals, one by one.

It's true that at one time I did share the outlook of the new perspective, and that I argued for a version of it in a book entitled, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles, published in 1986 by Cambridge University Press. This was one of a number of books and articles that followed in the wake of E. P. Sanders' Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977). But I don't want to waste your time with autobiographical ruminations in the 'how I changed my mind' genre. That would be self-indulgent, and also, in the absence of any Damascus-Road-type experiences, rather tedious. Suffice it to say that, in relation to the new perspective, I seem not to be one of the elect, the saints who are immune from apostasy and who infallibly persevere to the end. Since this is the decree of an inscrutable Providence, it's pointless to inquire into it any further. So we turn instead to the substantive issues.

2. Critique (I): points 1, 3, 5

I should like to deal with three of our five points rather rapidly, in order to focus more closely on the other two.

First, the criticism of the 'Lutheran approach' to Paul as a 'total travesty'. What is rejected is the view that Paul's theology of justification entails a sharp antithesis between divine and human action as intending salvation. The only point I wish to make is that the basic antithesis can take a wide variety of different forms. There may, for example, be an intense anxiety about individual salvation, imperilled by the law and its works but secured by Christ and his righteousness - as in Luther's 1535 commentary on Galatians, or in John Bunyan's Grace Abounding for the Chief of Sinners (a nightmarish work that almost seems to foreshadow Kafka). Alternatively, there may be a pietistic interest in the question of how faith arises in the individual soul. In that case, a mystical experience of union with Christ will be contrasted with external conformity to divinely ordained norms. Or God's act in Christ may be understood along rationalistic lines as simply making salvation easier. Since the law proved impossible to observe in full, God reduced the entrance requirement for his kingdom to one: we are merely to believe that Jesus is the Christ and that he was raised from the dead. John Locke produced an influential restatement of the protestant doctrine of justification along those lines in his 1695 work, The Reasonableness of Christianity. Moving closer to our own times, God's act of justification may occur in the renunciation of 'boasting' occasioned by the proclaimed word, as in Rudolf Bultmann, or it may encompass a universal divine saving action on the world's behalf, as in Karl Barth and Ernst Käsemann. Finally, the faith whereby we are justified may be identified with the faithfulness of Jesus. Only so, according to J. L. Martyn in his recent commentary on Galatians, is justification wholly and supremely God's action. All of these interpretations of Paul's doctrine of justification by faith not works entail a contrast between divine and human saving initiative, but in other respects they are quite different from each other, and in many cases opposed to each other. To speak of 'the Lutheran view of Paul' is to impose a spurious uniformity on these various possible readings of Paul.

Of course, all of these readings may be wrong to see in Paul an antithesis between divine and human saving initiative. My reason for emphasizing their diversity is to pre-empt the objection that, in seeking to reinstate that antithesis within the interpretation of Paul, one is also trying to reinstate Luther to his former pre-eminence as the interpreter of Paul par excellence. I'm personally not conscious of any such motivation. In fact, some fairly extensive reading in Luther's works leaves me feeling profoundly ambivalent about the great reformer. I rather hope that, in discussing the question of Pauline interpretation, we can set Luther aside and abandon question-begging talk of a 'Lutheran view of Paul'.

So much then for the 'Total travesty' point. Since I shall later offer a rather fuller discussion of points 2 and 4 ('Unconditional election' and 'Inclusive salvation'), we turn briefly now to point 3 ('Loyalty to the law'). The law, it is said, functions primarily to assert and preserve the difference between the elect and the Gentiles, and that is why 'boundary markers' such as circumcision come to the fore as fundamental to Jewish identity. The terminology and conceptuality here are derived from the social sciences, and therefore bring with them the assumption that a social-scientific account of the phenomena in question will shed far more light on their reality than a traditional theological one.

Sometimes these social-scientific accounts of the phenomena of the New Testament appear to be simply misguided - as, for example, when we're offered massive over-generalizations about something called 'ancient Mediterranean culture', in its contrast to an alleged 'modern western individualism'. On other occasions, the problem is that the social-scientific terminology and conceptuality produces conclusions that are not so much wrong as superficial. Certain practices may indeed serve to differentiate an in-group from an out-group. We remain seated to pray, and this differentiates us from those others, who kneel to pray. We fast on Wednesdays and Fridays, whereas they fast on Mondays and Thursdays - to take an example from the Didache. Yet the functionalist explanation of these practices in terms of group boundaries leaves unanswered the question why the in-group should wish to differentiate itself from an out-group in the first place. Why is the in-group a group at all? The answer is that the so-called 'boundary markers' function internally within a far more complex network of practices and beliefs that constitute the group's particular ethos and are sanctioned by its core ideology. Identity is not to be understood only in negative terms, as though one could be something purely by not being something else. On the contrary, group identity must be constituted positively as well as negatively; it must have its own positive content, offering its members or would-be members a total framework or paradigm within which life is to be lived. Identity is necessarily clarified by differentiation from others, but differentiation in itself cannot constitute that identity. A functionalist account of certain practices as reinforcing group boundaries tends to abstract them from the group's internal economy, which cannot be adequately explained in terms of any functionalist reduction, but can ultimately only be described. But to describe the ideology, ethos and practice of a group, in terms of its positively and negatively constituted identity, one must give an account of its 'theology'.

So point 3 of the new perspective, which I've entitled 'Loyalty to the law', is correct as far as it goes but doesn't get us very far. Distinctively Jewish practices do not and cannot serve only as boundary markers, and neither Paul nor his Jewish opponents understands them merely as such.

Point 5 was entitled 'Presuppositionless exegesis', and was intended to refer not to an impossible rejection of all presuppositions whatsoever, but to the demand that specifically theological presuppositions should be eliminated from the field of Pauline exegesis. I can best illustrate this by quoting from a recent book by my good friend, Dr Troels Engberg-Pedersen, of the University of Copenhagen, whom it's a great pleasure to welcome to this conference. In what he calls 'An Essay in Interpretation', at the start of his book on Paul and the Stoics, Dr Engberg-Pedersen emphasizes that his own approach is to be a non-theological one. He continues:

After more than one hundred and fifty years of historical criticism, that might seem obvious in a piece of scholarship on Paul. In fact, it is not... [F]ar too much scholarship that has a mainstream historical profile is also 'theological', though most often only implicitly and unavowedly. The historical-critical edge has been lost... By contrast..., [o]ne must part company with Paul and give up reading him merely from within. Instead, one must read the whole of Paul - including his 'theological' ideas - coolly from the outside. (p. 2)

Incidentally, the word 'theological' is enclosed here in scare quotes, as though the very use of this term threatened to sully the purity of one's purely historical discourse. Of course, the basic point has been made repeatedly in the Pauline scholarship of the last hundred and fifty years or more, in exactly this language. In Dr Engberg-Pedersen's words, we catch echoes of notable precedessors such as Baur, Wrede, Schweitzer, Stendahl, Sanders and Räisänen. Yet, despite more than one hundred and fifty years of their exhorting and scolding, scholars will keep muddling up their theology and their exegesis, in defiance of the most elementary scholarly purity code. Such is the lamentable frailty of human nature, even the human nature of the scholar.

Dr Engberg-Pedersen's book is to be the topic of a panel discussion at a meeting of the Paul seminar on Saturday morning, and I shall be offering some comments on his hermeneutical programme in that context. So I shall say no more at present on the topic of the new perspective's demand for a presuppositionless exegesis.

3. Critique (II): point 2

According to the new perspective's second point, it is generally accepted in pre-70 Judaism that the basis for the hope of final salvation is God's gracious election of Israel, expressed in the form of the covenant. Observance of the law is the Jew's grateful response to the prior reality of election and the covenant; it is a matter, as E. P. Sanders puts it, not of 'getting in' but of 'staying in'. There is therefore no question of 'earning salvation' by way of a 'works righteousness'. I shall argue that Sanders' account of 'Palestinian Judaism' still serves as a valuable corrective to a long tradition of crude and embarrassing misreadings of the Jewish sources, but that his argument does not achieve quite as much as is usually thought. Sanders' argument successfully marginalizes the previously dominant metaphor of 'earning' or 'meriting' salvation - salvation understood as the 'wages' or 'reward' for work done, a metaphor which is held to represent the quintessence of Jewish 'legalism'. But Sanders does not succeed in eliminating the idea that divine saving action, however understood, is conditional on faithful although not sinless law-observance. This view may not be universal in the sources, but it is nevertheless widespread. If, for some Jews at least, law-observance is indeed a condition of divine saving action, then there is no longer any reason to deny that Paul might have contrasted this emphasis on human action with his gospel's emphasis on the radical priority of divine action. There is no reason why he should not have said that the way of righteousness is the faith that recognizes and acknowledges God's prior saving action, and not those human actions that may be described as 'works of law'.

Anyone tempted to think that Sanders' argument can simply be dismissed might like to read the chapter entitled 'Jewish legalism' in Rudolf Bultmann's Primitive Christianity in its Contemporary Setting (1949). Here, without much reference to the sources, Bultmann interprets the Judaism of the intertestamental period as a futile attempt to escape the reality of history. God's saving history is confined to the scriptural past and the fantastic future of the apocalyptists. For the present, 'the nation lived outside history' and in 'extraordinary isolation' from the outside world (p. 60). God's transcendence was now understood metaphysically; ritual was more important that morality, so that Jews 'lost sight of their social and cultural responsibilities' (p. 62). The Law had to be obeyed unquestioningly, even when its precepts had become obsolete and meaningless with changing circumstances (p. 62); no attempt was made to determine their unifying principle. It is true that the Law would not have been experienced as a burden by those familiar with it from childhood, and that the Old Testament ethical tradition was still a living force. Yet, 'life makes demands which lie beyond the purview of the devout Jew, and Jewish morality became over-scrupulous and casuistical' (p. 67). This legalistic conception of obedience meant that 'the prospect of salvation became highly uncertain' (p. 70). Oddly, however, this uncertainty coexisted with a high level of self-righteousness. Even repentance 'became a good work which secured merit and grace in the sight of God. In the end the whole range of man's relation with God came to be thought of in terms of merit, including faith itself' (p. 71).

What is most striking in all this is the disapproving, judgmental tone. It is made unambiguously clear that Bultmann personally dislikes the historical phenomenon he is writing about, and that he intends to communicate that dislike to his readers, so that they too will learn to share his own disapproval of Judaism then and now. Sanders' suspicion that Bultmann's interpretation is dependent on poorly understood proof-texts from much later rabbinic writings, culled from Strack-Billerbeck, is probably well-founded. Hovering in the background of Bultmann's presentation is the normative conviction that life cannot be codified: intertestamental Judaism is understood as a conclusive demonstration of that conviction. No attempt is made to read the texts on their own terms; indeed, little attempt is made to read the texts at all. Clearly, any criticism of the new perspective must not entail any return to this kind of pseudo-scholarship. Sanders is entirely justified in criticizing it in the sharpest terms.

Yet there are serious shortcomings in Sanders' own presentation of 'Palestinian Judaism'. In particular, he does not adequately acknowledge the extent to which, in the literature of this period, covenant and law are indistinguishable from one another. According to this literature, there is no act of divine election that establishes the basis of God's relationship with Israel prior to and apart from the giving of the Law through Moses at Mount Sinai. The Sinai event is itself foundational.

Sanders attempts to hold divine election and Israel's law-observance apart from one another, and to ground final salvation so far as possible in the gracious divine election. This overlooks the fact that the Law given at Sinai is both the expression of the divine election of Israel and the divine demand for Israel's obedience. The Torah is simultaneously gift and demand, the embodiment of the two-sided covenant principle which states not only that 'I will be their God' but also that 'they shall be my people'. Israel must live as the elect people, thereby fulfilling its side of the covenant; and that means that Israel must live by the Torah. There is, then, no divine election or covenant that precedes or relativizes the Torah. Covenant and Torah are indistinguishable. The Torah is the basis of the relationship between God and Israel, and everything that precedes its disclosure at Sinai is retrospectively incorporated within its scope.

It is Paul alone who differentiates sharply between covenant or promise and law. As he puts it in Galatians 3.17: 'The law, which came four hundred and thirty years afterwards, does not annul a covenant previously ratified by God, so as to make the promise void'. On the one hand, the covenant with Abraham, which took the form of an unconditional promise; on the other hand, the law given through Moses at Sinai, which makes the divine gift of salvation or 'life' conditional on observing its commandments: 'The one who does these things will live by them' (Lev.18.5, quoted in Gal.3.12). This antithesis of promise and law is fundamental to Paul's scriptural hermeneutic, his attempt to demonstrate that the gospel he preaches really is 'according to the scriptures'. But no such antithesis is evident in the non-Christian Jewish texts. In those texts, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob do not inhabit a kind of law-free zone, living by promise alone. Their relationship with God is already determined in advance by the Torah, to which they show an exemplary obedience. There is, then, no divine covenant with Israel which can be differentiated from the covenant enacted at Mount Sinai. Unlike Paul, the texts in question all presuppose that the Sinai covenant is the enduring foundation of the divine-human relationship, it is therefore inconceivable to them that God's gracious election of Israel should have been established somewhere other than at Sinai. That means, however, that the question of Israel's observance or non-observance of the law is fundamental to the covenant itself. The covenant just is the demand imposed on Israel by Israel's God, with the conditional promise attached that 'the one who does these things shall live by them'. The entire book of Deuteronomy is an amplification of that statement, and we must assume that the authors of theintertestamental texts were familiar with Deuteronomy.

Take for example an important passage in Ben Sira 17, which opens with some reflections about God's creation of humankind in his own image, and his bestowal of the gifts of dominion and understanding (vv.1-10). But then the author suddenly jumps from Genesis 1 directly to Exodus 20, and we find ourselves standing with Israel at Mount Sinai:

He bestowed knowledge upon them, and allotted to them the law of life. He established with them an eternal covenant, and showed them his judgments. Their eyes saw his glorious majesty, and their ears heard the glory of his voice. And he said to them, Beware of all unrighteousness! And he gave commandment to each of them concerning his neighbour. (vv.11-14)

The reference to Sinai is clear here, and the divine bestowal is described here both as 'the law of life' and as 'an eternal covenant'. As elsewhere in this text, 'law' and 'covenant' are virtual synonyms. The law is the law of life in the sense that its commandments point the way to life; and this law is God's covenant with Israel. Of course, this author knows of divine mercy and forgiveness, of repentance and means of atonement, but his fundamental belief is that the law is given in order to be kept: that is why instruction in the law is so important.

Naturally this does not mean that the word 'covenant' is reserved exclusively for the event at Mount Sinai, and that the use of this term in connection with Abraham in Genesis 15 and 17 is abandoned in intertestamental literature. What is at issue is whether the covenant with Abraham constitutes the basis of God's covenant with Israel, to which the Sinai event is simply a very important addition. And the answer is clear: the Sinai event itself is basic, and the covenant with Abraham is subsumed within it. Ben Sira has this to say about Abraham:

Abraham was the great father of a multitude of nations, and no-one has been found like him in glory. He kept the law of the Most High, and was taken into covenant with him; he established the covenant in his flesh, and when he was tested he was found faithful. Therefore the Lord assured him by an oath that the nations would be blessed through his posterity... (Sir.44.19-21)

Here too, law and covenant are virtual synonyms. Abraham was indeed the privileged recipient of divine promises, but he received these promises as one who 'kept the law of the Most High' - an apparently general reference to a life of obedience to a law that had not yet been fully disclosed, although it is followed by a more specific reference to circumcision, 'the covenant in his flesh'. The promises are brought within the scope of the covenant given through Moses at Sinai, when (to quote from the following chapter)

[God] made him hear his voice, and led him into the thick darkness, and gave him the commandments face to face, the law of life and knowledge, to teach Jacob the covenant, and Israel his judgments. (45.5)

As already in Deuteronomy, the promises to the patriarchs are inseparable from 'the law of life and knowledge', God's covenant with Israel. Observance of the law is basic to Israel's existence as the covenant people of God. It is not the case that observance of the law occurs on the basis of a divine election that is already established prior to the law. In relation to Sanders' distinction between 'getting in' and 'staying in', the law is not given so that those who are already within the covenant may stay within it. Abraham himself gets into the covenant by observing the law - specifically, the requirement of circumcision. Yet the law that is observed is of course the law of the God who in the giving of the law enters into covenant with Israel. In the language of Ben Sira, 'the law which Moses commanded us' is identical to 'the book of the covenant of the Most High God' (24.23). Covenant or election and law-observance are much more closely connected than Sanders allows. If we are to maintain the typical post-Sanders affirmation that 'Judaism is a religion of grace', we must redefine 'grace' so that it includes the giving of commandments which are to be observed.

There is one highly significant aspect of the identification of covenant and law that doesn't appear in Ben Sira. Unfortunately, there's isn't time now to discuss it properly, so I shall merely mention it in passing. In the concluding chapters of Deuteronomy, Moses sets before the people the options of life or death, blessing or curse, and, as he elaborates the curses that will avenge the breaking of the covenant, it becomes clear that he is speaking not of a mere possibility but of the actuality of Israel's historical fate. On the eve of the conquest of the land, the eventual loss of the land is announced; the land that is to be occupied is a land that is already forfeited. In Deuteronomy 30.1-10, however, Moses envisages a second chance: Israel will turn back to their God in the place of their exile, they will practise the law, and God will restore them to their land. This deuteronomic schema was highly influential in the intertestamental period. The execution of the curses of the covenant is now seen as an accomplished fact, and the call to repentance and law-observance is a call to meet the precondition for the fulfilment of the prophetic promise of divine saving intervention. This deuteronomic schema is found, with minor variations, in a wide range of texts, including Jubilees, Daniel, Baruch, the Damascus Document, 4QMMT, the Assumption of Moses, and 4 Ezra. Here too, faithful observance of the commandments is fundamental to the covenant: those who do these things shall live by them.

Now, here at last is the crucial point. If law-observance is basic to the covenant, if it is in some sense a precondition of future divine saving action, then it becomes thinkable again that, in contrast to all this, the Pauline gospel should have laid all possible emphasis on an unconditional and already accomplished divine saving action. The outcome of this would be an antithesis between, on the one hand, the human conduct prescribed as the way to life, and, on the other hand, the divine action in which life is the outcome of the raising of Jesus. Of course, the new perspective has imposed a veto upon seeing any such antithesis of divine and human agency in Paul. The point I am making is that this veto does not derive from any definitive insight into the theology of the intertestamental texts.

4. Critique (III): point 4

From point 2, 'Unconditional election', we move on finally to a brief critique of point 4, 'Inclusive salvation', and in doing so we move from Paul's Jewish context to Paul himself.

In interpreting the relevant Pauline texts, the new perspective repeatedly performs a characteristic exegetical manoeuvre in three steps. Here's how it works. Step one: we observe that a Pauline text appears to be contrasting the logic of the gospel with the logic of a Jewish or Jewish Christian understanding of the law. Paul speaks of grace over against law, faith over against works; he seems to set believing the gospel of divine saving action over against practising the law. Step two: we know, however, that the point of these Pauline antitheses cannot be to contrast the gospel's emphasis on divine agency with a Jewish emphasis on human agency. If we think we see this antithesis between divine and human agency in Paul, we're still held captive by the ideology of the Reformation, resulting as it must do in a hostile caricature of Judaism. But how do we know that an antithesis between divine and human agency cannot be present in Paul's texts? Because Sanders has taught us that Judaism was and is a religion of grace; and, on this matter, Sanders speaks not only the truth but also the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Step three: we must therefore read the Pauline antithesis differently, as an 'ecclesiological' statement about the nature of the people of God. For Paul, 'faith' represents an inclusive understanding of the people of God as including non-law-observant Gentiles; 'works' represents an exclusive understanding of the people of God according to which full conversion to the practice of Judaism is a necessary precondition of salvation. What Paul is propounding is, in effect, an inclusive, universal, liberal form of Jewish covenant theology. To summarize the three steps, then. Step one: observation of an apparent antithesis in Paul's texts between divine grace and human law-observance. Step two: rejection of the view that this amounts to an antithesis between divine and human agency, with an appeal to the authority of Sanders. Step three: reinterpretation of the antithesis as arising from debate about the scope of the covenant people. With a little practice, this three-step routine becomes almost second nature. It's simple enough to be taught even to first year undergraduates. Yet we need to unlearn this routine, and stop teaching it to others. It rests on an inadequate reading both of the non-Christian Jewish literature and of Paul.

Unlearning anything is always painful and difficult, but let me make a start on this by making three brief concluding points about Pauline exegesis.

(1) It is true and important that Paul is concerned with the question of the scope of God's saving action in Jesus. God is not a God of Jews alone, but of Gentiles also: the proclamation of righteousness by faith is addressed to both (cf. Rom.3.29-30). Through his resurrection, Jesus has been enthroned as the universal Lord of all, Jew and Gentile alike, so that everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved (cf. Rom.10.6-13). Yet Paul's statements about the scope of divine saving action do not by any means exhaust what he has to say about its content. Paul does not confine himself to the abstract point that through Christ God has brought Gentiles within the scope of his covenant people. He speaks concretely of what God has done in Jesus, his Son, in giving him up for us all and in raising him to life. This is not just an enlargement of the scope of the covenant. On the contrary, the divine-human relationship is now set on a quite new basis, although in its universal scope it is still said to be 'in accordance with the scriptures'.

(2) For Paul, the unconditional divine saving action actualized in Jesus is anticipated in scripture in the form of the unconditional promise that God made to Abraham - a promise with universal scope that is now fulfilled in Jesus. It is this scriptural theme that enables Paul to free himself from the modified deuteronomic theologies of his Jewish contemporaries, without compromising his commitment to scriptural normativity. Since scripture's first and last word is promise, the Pauline gospel is truly a gospel 'according to the scriptures'. Paul does not speak of Abraham merely because his opponents may have done so, but because without the promise there is no gospel.

(3) Paul's understanding of the law is an attempt to resolve a fundamental scriptural anomaly. On the one hand, God commits himself unconditionally to future saving action on behalf of Abraham and the world. On the other hand, the law sets the divine-human relationship on a different basis, in which divine saving action is conditional on prior human obedience to the commandments. The one who does them shall live by them: that, in essence, is the law's project. The entire book of Deuteronomy is the message of Leviticus 18.5 writ large. How may Genesis and Deuteronomy be reconciled? The answer, for Paul, is that the law itself declares that its own project is a dead-end. It teaches that the one who does these things will find life thereby, but it also teaches that this quest is doomed to failure, leading inevitably to the execution of the curse that the law itself proclaims against transgressors (Gal.3.10-11, cf. Rom.3.9-20, 7.7-12). The law places responsibility for ultimate well-being in human hands, offering the choice of life or death, blessing or curse. But it also acknowledges that, through human sin, the inevitable outcome of its offer is not life or blessing but death and the curse. In that way, by acknowledging the failure of a project based on human agency, the law confirms the gospel's announcement that God in Christ has taken the human cause entirely into his own hands. 'Faith' is the acknowledgment, elicited and enabled by the gospel, that all this is indeed the case.

What I am suggesting in these all too brief remarks is that the primary location of the antithesis of divine and human agency in Paul is his scriptural hermeneutic, his interpretation of scripture in the light of the gospel and of the gospel in the light of scripture. If so, then his own evangelical construal of scripture can be compared and contrasted with the readings of Jewish contemporaries or predecessors for whom the covenant established through Moses at Sinai remains normative and intact. Paul and his fellow-Jewish interpreters are all reading the same texts. They share a marked bias towards the Pentateuch, believing that it is in the writings of Moses that the fundamental dynamics of the scriptural revelation come to light, and that the role of the prophets is to repeat, confirm and amplify what has already been said through Moses. They believe that their message to their contemporaries is inseparable from their construal of the scriptural texts. Yet for Paul these texts attest a definitive, unconditional divine saving action, whose scope is universal and whose glory quite eclipses the glory that once irradiated Moses' face. That is what differentiates him from his non-Christian contemporaries and predecessors, who all assume - in their different ways - that the law's project remains intact, and that those who observe it will find it to be the divinely ordained way to life and salvation.

In these final remarks, I have tried to show how, beyond all polemics against the new perspective, the Pauline antithesis of divine and human agency might be reinterpreted along hermeneutical lines, thereby enabling comparisons with the theological hermeneutics of intertestamental Jewish literature. At this point, I can do no more than report that, on the basis of my own current research, this seems to be a fruitful line of inquiry. In this paper, however, I haven't been able to develop this positive programme as fully as I would wish, because of the prior need to expose some of the serious shortcomings of the 'new perspective'.

In retrospect, then, and in spite of all misgivings or qualifications, my title - 'Not the New Perspective' - seems to have been justified. In order to proceed 'beyond the new perspective', we must first say no! to it. After every allowance has been made for its genuine and valuable insights, the verdict must be a negative one. By imposing its own pseudo-theological agenda on the Pauline texts, the new perspective has hindered our access to Paul's own theology - that is, to his complex elaboration of the gospel's simple announcement that, in raising Jesus from the dead, God has acted definitively and unconditionally for the salvation of humankind, as the law and the prophets bear witness.

This page was last modified on: Tuesday, 25-May-2004 15:04:39 BST

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