Recently, I have been
reading Stephen Westerholm’s Israel’s Law and the Church’s Faith: Paul and
His Recent Interpreters. So far, it has been a fascinating read. Firstly,
he reviews the recent scholarly debate, and then offers his own thoughts. The chapters
in Part Two are: i) Matters of Definition, ii) Justification by Faith, iii) The
Law in God’s Scheme, iv) The Law and Christian Behaviour, and v) Paul’s
Contribution.
For me, justification
by faith and the issue of ‘the Law’ are arguably the most important aspects of Paul’s
thought. In other words, how does Paul – a former Jew steeped in Scripture – make
sense of how Jesus transforms his reading of the Old Testament? Because surely
for Paul, the way he read the Hebrew Scriptures prior to the Damascus road was
surely diametrically different from how he later understood, and preached it.
So in our church Bible
studies, we are currently studying Paul’s letter to the Romans. It has been
great, diving (quite deeply) into this epistle, especially in exploring Paul’s
mature thought process. Right, so here’s the connection between Westerholm’s
book and Romans that I want to highlight: he suggests that in Paul’s thinking, he
begins with Jesus’ death, and then moves logically backwards to diagnose
the problem. Hence, from solution to plight.
This formulation is from E. P. Sanders, of whom most Evangelicals (I think) would say is wrong. There
is definitely an Evangelical suspicion of the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), but
though their suspicion is warranted, I think that dialogue is still important. Anyway,
back to my point, when I first read this, I was pretty fascinated, because many
of the arguments do make sense.
This is an abstract
from Westerholm’s summary of Sanders’ arguments:
“What Paul begins with
is the conviction that only belonging to Christ brings salvation. “For Paul,
the conviction of a universal solution preceded the conviction of a universal
plight” (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, 474). If this, as Sanders argues,
is the case, then the starting-point of Paul’s thought can hardly be any
sense that the effort to keep the law was misdirected. Whatever the criticisms
Paul may bring against the law, they all presuppose his faith in Christ”
(p. 83).
He makes an important
point that the problem of the law is not it led to self-righteousness or
legalism, but that it did not lead to the righteousness of faith. (At
this point, it is crucial to point out that when I use ‘law,’ I generally mean
the moral commandments of the Mosaic code. There is no space here to explain
why. The short answer is that, having read Westerholm’s arguments, they sound
pretty convincing. His points in a nutshell, Paul’s way of talking about the
law emphasises that it is something which demands works, hence, moral
injunctions.) This is important because I think many Christians understand
Judaism to essentially mean works-salvation. It might be helpful, but that is probably
not the opponent that Paul was engaging with. I might be accused of being
nit-picky about things, but if our diagnosis of the disease is different from
Paul’s diagnosis, then our understanding of the solution Paul presents might be
different from what he intended.
NOTE: I do not think it
would be radically different, but nuances are very important. Furthermore, is it
not the Christian’s duty and desire to better understand our Bibles, to correct
misconceptions – however small?
Right, that is a long (but
I think necessary) preamble. What I really want to say is that the case for
Paul thinking first about the solution, and moving backwards to articulating
the human predicament, is a pretty strong one:
“It is certainly true
that Paul did not start with a conviction about the hopelessness of the human
predicament under sin, then grasp at Christ as the answer to the dilemma. On the
other hand, Paul inherited – he did not first posit – the notion that Christ’s
death was “for our sins” (the traditional phrase in 1 Cor. 15:3; cf. Rom. 3:25;
4:24-25, etc.); hence, broadly speaking, the solution imposed its own view of
the human plight on Paul, and the plight thus defined was no more an option to
Paul than was the solution itself. That a conviction of universal sin cannot be
independently proven is no reason for thinking it less than fundamental to
Paul. Moreover, the conviction itself dictates neither a particular view of the
origin of sin nor a precise definition of the nature of its power. Paul’s wrestlings
with these latter issues [...] confirms rather than undermines the central
place occupied by sin in Paul’s thinking about the human plight. Surely a belief
that God’s Son died for the sins of humanity would lead Paul to take human sin
with an awesome earnest” (p. 160-1)!
A closing thought. This
might mean nothing to anyone who reads this, and that is alright (I hope). But as
a Literature student, I am convinced that if we can understand a text better, and
it is worth it to do so, then by all means we should attempt it. And I think
the Bible ticks both boxes – it probably ticks a lot more boxes! Perhaps on a
pastoral level, nothing has changed, sin still logically precedes God’s solution;
the slight nuance though, is that our view of how sin relates to law will
probably vary.
