Position · 1977

New Perspective on Paul

A reading of Paul which holds that first-century Judaism was not a religion of earning salvation by works, and that Paul’s teaching on justification mainly concerns how Jews and Gentiles belong together in God’s covenant people.

History

Roots

For most of Protestant history, Paul was read through Martin Luther. Luther found in Romans and Galatians the answer to his own terror before a holy God: sinners are declared righteous by faith, not by works. That reading cast the Judaism Paul argued against as a mirror of late-medieval Catholicism, a religion where people tried to earn God’s favour by keeping the law. The Reformation confessions, Lutheran and Reformed alike, built justification by faith alone on that reading of Paul’s opponents.

Doubts came first from scholars of Judaism. George Foot Moore’s “Christian Writers on Judaism” (1921) and Claude Montefiore argued that Christian scholarship had caricatured the rabbis, who spoke constantly of God’s mercy and repentance. W. D. Davies’s Paul and Rabbinic Judaism (1948) read Paul as a Jew who believed the Messiah had come, not as a convert from a religion of merit. These voices stayed at the edge of New Testament studies.

The first direct challenge to the Lutheran Paul came from Krister Stendahl, a Swedish Lutheran and later dean of Harvard Divinity School. His essay “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” (Harvard Theological Review, 1963) argued that Paul had a “robust conscience” and showed no sign of Luther’s anguish. Western readers since Augustine, he said, had turned a first-century question about Gentiles into a timeless question about guilty individuals. Paul’s real concern was how Gentiles could join God’s people without becoming Jews.

Causes

The movement took off with E.P. Sanders’s Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977, Archive.org; Fortress Press 40th-anniversary edition). Sanders surveyed rabbinic literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls and other Jewish writings from 200 BC to AD 200 and found one common “pattern of religion,” which he called covenantal nomism: “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” (p. 75, as quoted by J. David Stark (secondary)). Israel was elected by grace. The law was how Israel stayed in the covenant, not how anyone got in.

If that was Judaism, Paul could not have been attacking legalism. Sanders concluded that Paul reasoned “from solution to plight”: he started from the conviction that God had acted in Christ for everyone, and only then decided the law could not be the way. His summary became famous: what Paul found wrong in Judaism was that it was not Christianity. Sanders developed the case in Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (1983, Archive.org). Heikki Räisänen’s Paul and the Law (1983) went further and argued that Paul’s statements on the law are simply inconsistent.

James Dunn gave the movement its name in his Manson Memorial Lecture at Manchester in 1982, published as “The New Perspective on Paul” in the Bulletin of the John Rylands Library (1983). Dunn accepted Sanders’s Judaism but thought Sanders had left Paul arbitrary. N.T. Wright had used the phrase earlier, in his 1978 Tyndale lecture “The Paul of History and the Apostle of Faith,” according to Dunn (Wikipedia, secondary).

Influence

Within twenty years the New Perspective was the default starting point in academic Pauline studies, and every commentary on Romans or Galatians had to take a side. Wright carried it into the churches through popular books such as What Saint Paul Really Said (1997, Archive.org), which made it a live issue for Evangelical pastors and seminarians.

It also prompted the largest evangelical defence of the Reformation doctrine of justification in a century, and church bodies began issuing reports on it in the 2000s. The scholarly field has since moved past it in several directions: the “Paul within Judaism” school, which reads Paul as never leaving Torah-observant Judaism at all; apocalyptic readings such as Douglas Campbell’s The Deliverance of God (2009); and John Barclay’s Paul and the Gift (Eerdmans, 2015), which tries to move the argument onto new ground.

Key ideas and contributors

Judaism was a religion of grace. This is Sanders’s foundation. Jews did not think they earned their place with God by piling up merit; they belonged by election and stayed by obedience and repentance. Paul’s own claim to have been “blameless” under the law (Philippians 3:4–6) is read as a description of covenant faithfulness, not of a guilty conscience.

“Works of the law” are boundary markers. Dunn argued that when Paul says no one is justified “by works of the law” (Galatians 2:16), he means above all circumcision, food laws and the Sabbath: the practices that marked Jews off from Gentiles. Paul’s target is national exclusivism, the assumption that God’s people must look Jewish. The context of that verse, the dispute at Antioch over Jews and Gentiles eating together (Galatians 2:11–14), is the key exhibit. So is Romans 3:29–30: “Or is God the God of Jews only?”

Justification is about membership. Wright defines justification as “God’s declaration that a person is in the right; that is, (a) that their sins have been forgiven, and (b) that they are part of the single covenant family promised to Abraham” (“New Perspectives on Paul”, Tenth Edinburgh Dogmatics Conference, 2003). On this reading justification is not mainly how a person becomes a Christian, which Wright calls the “call,” but God’s verdict on who already belongs to his people. Faith is the badge of membership that replaces the old markers.

God’s righteousness is his covenant faithfulness. Wright reads “the righteousness of God” (Romans 1:17, Romans 3:21–26) as God’s faithfulness to his promise to Abraham to bless the whole world through Israel, kept in the Messiah. It is not, on his view, a moral quality transferred to believers.

A single, if quarrelsome, family. The writers grouped under the label disagree a great deal. Sanders thought Paul’s theology was largely incoherent at the edges; Dunn and Wright think it hangs together. Wright says he “never embraced either Sanders’s picture of Paul or the relativistic agendas which seemed to be driving it” (same lecture). What unites them is the revised picture of Judaism and the conviction that Paul’s justification language belongs to the Jew–Gentile question.

Key controversies

Was Judaism really so uniform? The main historical objection came from Justification and Variegated Nomism, edited by D. A. Carson, Peter O’Brien and Mark Seifrid (2 vols., 2001 and 2004). Its contributors found Second Temple Judaism too varied for one pattern and found strands that did make obedience a condition of final salvation. Simon Gathercole’s Where Is Boasting? (2002) argued that Jews expected final vindication on the basis of their obedience, which is exactly the confidence Paul attacks in Romans 3:27. Seifrid summarised the critique in an article for Themelios (vol. 25.2), arguing that 4 Ezra and similar texts make obedience a condition alongside election.

Does Paul ever talk about works in general? Critics point to texts where Paul contrasts faith with any human doing, not just Jewish markers: God “justifies the ungodly” apart from works (Romans 4:4–5); salvation is “not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:8–9); election is “not because of works” (Romans 9:11). Stephen Westerholm’s Perspectives Old and New on Paul (2004) defended what he called the “Lutheran” Paul on these grounds: whatever first-century Jews believed, Paul himself saw the human problem as sin, and the law as unable to fix it.

Imputed righteousness. This is the theological centre of the dispute. Reformation theology holds that Christ’s righteousness is credited to the believer (2 Corinthians 5:21, Philippians 3:9). Wright argues that a judge’s righteousness cannot be passed to a defendant and that Paul’s language is better described as incorporation into the Messiah. John Piper’s The Future of Justification: A Response to N. T. Wright (2007) argued that this loses the heart of the gospel. Wright answered with Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (2009). The exchange is the best single entry point to the debate.

Final justification by works. Wright and Dunn take seriously Paul’s statement that “the doers of the law who will be justified” (Romans 2:13) and speak of a future justification that accords with the whole life lived. Critics say this reintroduces works into salvation by the back door and drifts toward Catholic teaching as defined at the Council of Trent. Wright replies that the life in question is the Spirit’s work, and that Reformed theology already says faith is never alone.

Church responses. The Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s Report of the Committee to Study the Doctrine of Justification (73rd General Assembly) examined the New Perspective and the related Federal Vision movement and judged key claims incompatible with the Westminster Standards. The Presbyterian Church in America adopted a similar report in 2007 (cited by title; no link verified). Some Roman Catholic and ecumenical writers welcomed the New Perspective as easing the old Protestant–Catholic quarrel, which the Joint Declaration on Justification (1999) was addressing in the same years. That ecumenical appeal is part of what worried its Reformed critics.

Is it fair to Luther? A quieter line of criticism says the “Lutheran Paul” was a straw man. Luther and John Calvin did not claim that every Jew was a self-conscious legalist; they claimed that all humans, Jew and Gentile, try to justify themselves before God. Defenders of the New Perspective answer that the old reading still distorted both Judaism and Paul’s actual arguments.

What remains unresolved

Almost everyone now accepts part of the New Perspective: older Christian portraits of Judaism were often unfair, and Paul’s arguments about the law were bound up with the place of Gentiles. The dispute is over whether that social question is the whole of justification or one application of a deeper claim about sinners and a righteous God. Most critics accept the first part and reject the second. Most defenders say they never meant to deny forgiveness, only to put it inside Paul’s larger story of Israel and the nations.