The New Perspective on Paul...Again
I'm trying to study the subject since I really don't know what this "New Perspective on Paul" is all about. I own Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision also Paul: Fresh Perspectives by N.T. Wright. I wish I had John Piper's book that's supposed to refute this so I can see where all of this is going. Is there any resource in Logos that could supplement my study on this (new to me) subject. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Blessings!
DAL
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DAL said:
I'm trying to study the subject since I really don't know what this "New Perspective on Paul" is all about. I own Justification: God's Plan and Paul's Vision also Paul: Fresh Perspectives by N.T. Wright. I wish I had John Piper's book that's supposed to refute this so I can see where all of this is going. Is there any resource in Logos that could supplement my study on this (new to me) subject. Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
Blessings!
DAL
One of the best you had better hurry on. It ships as a pre-pub tomorrow for $49.95 but will likely cost much more than that after it ships.
The title is Justification and Variegated Nomism
http://www.logos.com/product/31422/justification-and-variegated-nomism
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Randy Lane said:
One of the best you had better hurry on. It ships as a pre-pub tomorrow for $49.95 but will likely cost much more than that after it ships.
The title is Justification and Variegated Nomism
http://www.logos.com/product/31422/justification-and-variegated-nomism
Great call, Randy. That will increase to $64.95 once it ships.
Product Department Manager
Faithlife0 -
Thanks for the suggestions, only problem is that at the moment I'm not in full time (and recently not even part time) ministry. So don't really have a book budget. Isn't there a Carson website where he had/has some lectures on the subject? I think I saw one posted in the forums but I can't seem to find it. Great suggestions, though. Hopefully if I ever get back in the ministry, at least part time, I'll be able to get these volumes you all mentioned.
DAL
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DAL said:
Isn't there a Carson website where he had/has some lectures on the subject?
DAL
http://www.theopedia.com/New_Perspective_on_Paul
http://www.sbts.edu/resources/lectures/gheens/problems-with-the-new-perspective-on-paul/
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Thanks Robert! I'd like to add this one I found: Links on the New Perspective on Paul -- Is a collection of links to articles analyzing N.T. Wright's position, Piper's response and other helpful material. Boy I got lots of reading to do and notes to take!!!
DAL
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You can also get some PDFs and MP3s from Wright's perspective here: http://ntwrightpage.com/
Despite the term, I don't really think there is a "new" perspective. There's a correction to the anti-Jewish perspective of German scholars prior to World War II, and a recognition that this anti-Jewish bias comes out in Luther's polemic against the Catholicism of his day, and that it probably goes back to very early in church history when Christians experienced rejection from traditional Judaism. The NP therefore emphasizes the continuity between the story of Israel in the OT and the story of Jesus in the NT. But the NP is not a monolithic systematic, e.g. Jimmy Dunn's perspective has different emphases than Tom Wright's.
From a completely different angle, the Dead Sea Scrolls have also enhanced our appreciation for the diversity within Second Temple Judaism, and the extent to which early Christianity was a development within it.
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In some reading I was doing a few weeks ago I came across a brilliant explanation on New Perspective on Paul. I came away excited that I finally got my head around what the topic is about.
The section is attached below along with a link to the resource
Scholars view a consensus as a challenge. It is the very nature of the academic approach to question what most assume to be true—to take a hard, critical look at the ruling paradigms. And that is no bad thing. We too easily can get locked into certain ways of looking at the Bible and never stop to ask whether our approach is the right one or not. If the Bible is truly to be our authority for all of life, then we must constantly be reassessing our reading of its message. Very often, in fact, our failure to appreciate the real message of Scripture lies in certain assumptions about how we read the text—assumptions that we might not even be aware that we hold.
And so it was that in the last half of the twentieth century scholars began asking some serious questions about the ruling consensus among interpreters of Romans. Two questions in particular came to the forefront and set the agenda for the current debate about the nature of Romans. These questions match the two key points in the “individual salvation” reading of Romans mentioned above.
Thus, the first question was whether Romans indeed focuses on the individual. Scholars such as Krister Stendahl argue that our individualistic reading of Romans (and of Paul generally) arose in the modern era, especially under the influence of Luther. Luther’s problem was how he, as an individual human being, could find rest for his troubled conscience. But that was not the issue that Paul was grappling with. Indeed, Stendahl suggests, concern about what he called the “introspective conscience” arose in the modern Western world. People in ancient times simply didn’t think that way. We have made the mistake of reading into Romans our own concerns.
What, then, was Paul’s real concern in Romans? The “people” question: What does God’s gracious work in Christ mean for the two great “people groups” of Paul’s world, Jews and Gentiles? Romans is not basically about how an individual human being can get right with God; it is about how Gentiles can be added into God’s people without disenfranchising God’s “original” people, the Jews.1 This was the great question that confronted the Jewish apostle Paul in the first century as he sought to explain and defend the gospel. Generations of Jews, reading the Old Testament promises of God about the Messiah and the salvation he would bring, naturally thought that those promises would bring great blessing for the Jewish people. But by the time Paul writes Romans, something strange and unexpected has happened. Comparatively few Jews have responded to the gospel, while Gentiles have turned to Christ in significant numbers. The church is taking on an overwhelmingly Gentile profile. But if the preaching of the gospel is bringing salvation to the Gentiles while leaving most Jews hardened in their sins, how can the gospel truly be “the gospel of God” (Rom 1:1)? Did not the same God who sent his Son to the cross and raised him from the dead to usher in the age of fulfillment promise that he would bless Israel? We find Paul tackling this thorny question in chapters 9–11 of Romans. And for Stendahl and many others, those chapters, not Romans 1–4, are the heart of Romans. The “people question” is what Romans is really about. Romans is not so much about the history of the individual as about the history of salvation.
A second question attacked the second plank in the Reformation platform. Luther’s conviction that God offers the grace of salvation unconditionally to anyone who believes was forged in the fires of controversy. As a monk, he struggled to understand how his acts of religious devotion, however many, could ever enable him to appear before a perfect and holy God. And as a reformer, he fought for his vision of the gospel with a Roman Catholic church that insisted on works as a necessary condition for true righteousness before God. We should not be surprised, then, that Luther tended to read Romans as an ancient parallel to his own experience. Paul was cast in the role of the reforming Luther, and the Jews took the place of a legalistic Roman Catholicism. For Luther, then, and for those who have followed in his interpretive footsteps, Paul emphasizes justification by faith in order to counter the Jewish view of justification by works. Jews, in the traditional consensus, tended to base a right standing with God on the quantity of good works that a person was able to accomplish. Paul, in contrast, proclaims that a person can gain right standing with God only by an act of humble faith. Again, I suspect that many of us would readily identify this understanding of matters as the one we have been taught. Indeed, many of us have probably considered this way of looking at Paul and the Jews as obvious and unquestioned.
But suppose the Jewish people in Paul’s day were not teaching justification by works? This is precisely the question that a significant number of scholars have begun asking in the last thirty years. The seminal figure is E. P. Sanders, who wrote a book in 1977 that systematically argued for a very different view of the ancient Jewish faith than had been customary among both scholars and laypeople.2 Essentially, Sanders claims that Jews in Paul’s day did not believe that they would be saved by obeying the law, or by “good works.” They believed that God had established a covenant with the Jewish people and that they would be saved because, as Jews, they belonged to that covenant. Salvation was based, then, on God’s covenant election. To be sure, Jews made a great deal of obeying the law. They obeyed God’s law, however, not to “get saved” but to “stay saved,” not to enter into the covenant but to stay in the covenant. Sanders dubbed this way of understanding first-century Judaism “covenantal nomism.” (“Nomism” comes from the Greek word for “law,” nomos, and is a deliberate contrast to “legalism.”) Although Sanders was not the first to argue this understanding of Judaism, his book came at the right time to create a significant shift in the scholarly consensus.
Many scholars now agree that Sanders’s covenantal nomism describes first-century Judaism accurately. But how, then, should we read Romans? What is Paul’s point when he claims, “No one will be declared righteous in his [God’s] sight by observing the law” (literally, “by works of the law”) (Rom 3:20)? If Jews did not claim that a person had to do the law to be justified before God, why would Paul say this? Scholars have come up with quite a variety of answers to these questions. The most persuasive answers have come from James D. G. Dunn.3 Picking up from the first point above—about how Paul was most concerned with the “people” issue—Dunn argues that Paul’s problem with “works of the law” was that they excluded Gentiles from God’s salvation in Christ. Jewish devotion to the law was wrapped up in the covenant that God made with Israel. But that covenant was made with Israel and not with the other peoples of the world. So when Christ came to offer salvation to all, obedience to the law could no longer be the focal point of the people of God. This is where the Jews were making their mistake, Dunn thinks. Their problem, in Paul’s view, was not that they were insisting that people had to obey the law to be saved. (Sanders had already shown that this was not the case.) Rather, their problem was that they were trying to keep God’s salvation to themselves by clinging to the law as their badge of national privilege. The problem Paul had with “works of the law,” then, was not so much the “works” part as the “law” part. With the coming of Christ, Paul was arguing in verses like Romans 3:20, being justified by God was no longer tied to the Jewish covenant but was freely available to everyone.
The kind of interpretation that Dunn argues has become widely accepted among scholars. Indeed, people talk about a “paradigm shift” in Pauline studies and speak of the new perspective on Paul and on Romans. Why is it important to learn about it? Because it suggests a different way of approaching and reading Romans. Our understanding of many individual verses and paragraphs in the letter will be changed if we adopt the new perspective as the lens through which we read the book.
So we now have two different approaches to Romans on the table before us: (1) the “Reformation approach,” with its focus on individual salvation and assumption of Jewish legalism; and (2) the “new perspective,” with its focus on people groups and a covenantal nomistic view of Judaism.0 -
Gabe Martini said:Randy Lane said:
One of the best you had better hurry on. It ships as a pre-pub tomorrow for $49.95 but will likely cost much more than that after it ships.
The title is Justification and Variegated Nomism
http://www.logos.com/product/31422/justification-and-variegated-nomism
Great call, Randy. That will increase to $64.95 once it ships.
Still waiting for this to ship today! Hope it does
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Geo Philips said:
Still waiting for this to ship today! Hope it does
Same here [Y]! I really hope it doesn't get pushed back.
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Andy Evans said:Geo Philips said:
Still waiting for this to ship today! Hope it does
Same here
! I really hope it doesn't get pushed back.My copy has come home [<:o)]
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Jack Caviness said:Andy Evans said:Geo Philips said:
Still waiting for this to ship today! Hope it does
Same here
! I really hope it doesn't get pushed back.My copy has come home
Just downloaded mine today. Looking forward to reading it.
Using adventure and community to challenge young people to continually say "yes" to God
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Bruce Dunning said:
Just downloaded mine today. Looking forward to reading it.
I downloaded and started reading my copy yesterday.
[:D]
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