From Solution to Plight

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.