Reconsidering Key Pauline Passages
Unless otherwise noted, all Scripture references are from the New Revised Standard Version.
According to the new perspective on Paul, the early Judaizing controversy which framed Paul's arguments regarding justification was not a controversy about whether individuals are capable of "earning" salvation before a righteous God. Rather, it was a controversy about whether Gentiles should be accepted into the new covenant people of God as Gentiles. The controversy involved practices like table-fellowship rather than moralism. Paul's opponents were not legalists striving to merit the favor of God but rival teachers creating division along ethnic lines.
If this line of argument is correct, it follows that the doctrine of justification is not simply an individual, existential matter, but a very concrete social matter as well. It means that the primary concern addressed in epistles like Galatians and Romans is not about divine sovereignty and human inability, but about social barriers in the church. This case, however, needs to be argued carefully in order to gain a serious hearing. It is the purpose of this article to look more closely at key Pauline texts with this issue in mind.1
Preliminary Considerations: Judaism and the Law
Such a reconsideration would be difficult without the groundbreaking work of E.P. Sanders, who in his widely influential 1977 book2 argued persuasively that the Lutheran-Weberian interpretation of Judaism as a religion of legalism was a gross distortion. Many scholars have tried to accommodate some of the corrective work of Sanders yet preserve the traditional Protestant emphasis on individual justification as well. Among them is Frank Thielman, who in his book Paul & The Law3 posits general agreement between Paul and first-century Judaism on the principle that justification is not by the works of the law. The difference, according to Thielman, is eschatological. Drawing largely on Josephus and the apocrypha, Thielman argues that most Jews agreed they had broken the law and were under a curse (foreign domination). They looked to a time when God would change their hearts so that they could obey the law. According to Paul, that time had already come with the death of Christ.4
For Thielman, it appears that this curse functions in part as the historical Jewish counterpart to the Protestant doctrine of total depravity. However, Jewish writers could certainly believe in widespread national disobedience without implying that every individual person in Israel was wicked and disobedient. Commenting on Ps. Sol. 17:19,205 and the use of Psalm 14 (cf. 14:3, "there is no one who does good, no, not one") in Romans 3, Stanley K. Stowers writes:
The psalmist's statements are just as bold and exceptionless as Paul's, but interpreters have learned to provide historical contexts for such statements in 1 Enoch, the Qumran writings, and the Psalms of Solomon, while in Paul interpreters read them as the most literal universal philosophical propositions about human nature. The writer of the Psalms of Solomon did not think that every single inhabitant of Jerusalem or the land of Israel was totally evil but only that the representatives of the nation had been co-opted and that unfaithfulness had reached unheralded proportions.6
In fact Psalm 14 itself distinguishes between the wicked (v. 4) and the righteous (v. 5), a common and very real distinction in the Old Testament and Jewish literature. Turning to Stowers again:
Paul has an unambiguous belief in the last judgment of every individual, including faithful believers in Christ. He also believes in degrees of sin, reward, and punishment. These beliefs about individual judgment and degrees of reward have a close relation to the distinction between the lawless (ho anomos) person and the righteous person (ho dikaios). Speaking of the concept of the wicked in the Synoptic gospels, E. P. Sanders writes, "It refers to those who sinned willfully and heinously and who did not repent." These conceptions of the wicked and the righteous have been erased by interpretations which have Paul claiming that it is necessary to keep the law perfectly in order to be considered righteous. Paul neither argues nor suggests that doctrine. All of this flies in the face of the dominant Western understanding of Paul's doctrine of justification by faith alone.7
This critical point deserves to be elaborated. Paul's argument against the Judaizers could hardly have been that the law cannot be obeyed, therefore righteousness comes through faith.8 According to Paul's own testimony, he had kept the law blamelessly as a Pharisee (Phil. 3:6). Similarly, Luke writes that Zechariah and Elizabeth "were righteous before God, living blamelessly according to all the commandments and regulations of the Lord" (1:6). This is fully in accord with the teaching of the law itself. Moses assured the Israelites: "Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach" (Deut. 30:11, NIV). Far from being crushed by the impossible demands of an unfulfillable law, the righteous person's "delight is in the law of the LORD" (Psa. 1:2).
This does not mean that the blameless person literally never sins. The perfectionistic standard that is read back into the law simply does not fit the context. The pious author of Psalm 119 may have confessed sin (119:176), but from the remainder of the psalm it is clear that the overall pattern of the author's life was one of faithfulness and blameless law-keeping and that the psalmist was a righteous person.
There is another fatal flaw in the tradition of the all-or-nothing perfectionistic law: The sacrificial system of Israel. George Howard writes:
Paul, who by his own admission knew the law well (Gal. 1:14), knew that the cultic aspect of the law implied the imperfection of man. The Levitical system of sacrifices provided a means whereby man, when he sinned, could obtain forgiveness. In fact observance of the law to a large degree involved the offering of sacrifices for the atonement of sins. To keep the law was, among other things, to find cultic forgiveness for breaking the law. For Paul to have argued that the law demanded absolute obedience and that one legal infraction brought with it unpardonable doom, would have been for him to deny what all the world knew, namely, that the Jerusalem temple stood as a monument to the belief that Yahweh was a forgiving God who pardoned his people when they sinned.9
Similarly, James D.G. Dunn writes:
Nor did God require a sinless perfection from his people or require that his forgiveness had to be earned. The whole sacrificial system, including the sin-offering and the Day of Atonement, was provided by God as a means of conveying forgiveness to the penitent.10
Far from being a religion of legalistic perfectionism, then, first-century Judaism was a religion of election and grace.
Paul and the Law
To see how this perspective plays out in relation to specific Pauline texts, it will be helpful first to consider the different ways in which Paul writes about the law. Sometimes his statements are negative, sometimes positive. Making sense out of these references and preserving a consistent Pauline view of the law has been the sticking point for interpreters. For example, Paul writes that it is "doers of the law who will be justified" (Rom. 2:13). But he also writes that "'no human being will be justified'...by deeds prescribed by the law" (Rom. 3:20). Now which is it? If obeying the law is the same thing as practicing the "works" or "deeds of the law," then Paul is contradicting himself. Hence the importance of scrutinizing Paul's vocabulary and seeking to appreciate the nuances of his thought.
First, Paul seems to write about the law in terms of ethnic distinction. Since the law was given to Israel, it follows that Gentiles are those who "do not possess the law" (Rom. 2:14) and live "apart from the law" (Rom. 2:12; 1 Cor. 9:21). In each of these verses one's status with regard to the law is not relevant; in other words, one is not disadvantaged before God if he or she is not a Jew.
Second, Paul writes very negatively about one's condition "under the law" (Rom. 2:12; 3:19; 6:14; 1 Cor. 9:20; Gal. 3:23; 4:4; 5:21; 5:18). In this state one is relying on "the works of the law," another critical term that is used exclusively in a negative way (Rom. 3:21,27,28; Gal. 2:16; 3:2,5,10; cp. Rom. 9:32; Gal. 3:12). Similarly, the phrases "through the law" (Rom. 4:13; Gal. 2:21) and "from the law" (Gal. 3:12) are negative. And we hardly need to add "the law of sin and death" (Rom. 8:2), "the law weakened by the flesh" (Rom. 8:3).
Third, however, is the very positive category occupied by the "doers of the law" (Rom. 2:13), those who "do what the law requires" (Rom. 2:14), who "obey" or "practice the law" (Rom. 2:25), "keep the requirements of the law" (Rom. 2:26; contrast Gal. 6:13), "keep the law" (Rom. 2:27), "establish" or "uphold the law" (Rom. 3:31), who "fulfill," have "fulfilled," or are "fulfilling the law" (Rom. 13:8,10; Gal. 5:14; 6:2). This is the "law of faith" (Rom. 3:27), the "law of the spirit of life" (Rom. 8:2), "Christ's law" (1 Cor. 9:21).
So, then, in Paul's own language, there are those who keep the law and there are those who don't. Ironically, those "under the law" performing "the works of the law" are the ones who don't keep the law (Rom. 2:23,27; Gal. 3:10; 6:13)!
Can we be more specific? Can we move beyond the mere vocabulary words, fleshing out the distinctions between these contrasting ways of approaching the law?11 I believe that we can, and that our effort hinges on a proper understanding of the specific phrase "the works of the law." This phrase is important not only because it is one of Paul's key phrases but also because of its central position in the very passages in which Paul articulates the doctrine of justification by faith. It is to these passages that we now turn.
Galatians 1-3
Like the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone, Paul's doctrine of justification by faith did not evolve in a systematic theological vacuum but in a very real historical setting in response to a very real crisis within the church. This setting is clearly articulated in Paul's first letter enunciating his understanding of justification, his letter to the Galatians. The fact that Paul would interrupt his opening greeting with a defense of his apostleship (Gal. 1:1) is telling. The gospel which he had preached among the Galatian churches was being undermined by "another gospel" (1:6-9). The brief autobiographical account which follows includes a rather difficult articulation of Paul's relationship with the Jerusalem church and its leading apostles.
Paul's narrative of the conflicts and treaty leading up to the crisis in Antioch revolves around circumcision (2:1-10) and food laws (2:12a). Insistence on observing these distinctively Jewish practices was contrary to "the truth of the gospel" (2:14a). Already we can see something of the dynamic of Paul's gospel and what it was that threatened it. It was not the relationship between the divine sovereignty and the human will which formed the core of the gospel, but the relationship between Jews and Gentiles. Paul's defense of the gospel directed toward Peter and "the circumcision faction" was not, "If you, a sinner, cannot earn your salvation before God, how can you compel others to earn their salvation?" His defense was rather, "If you, though a Jew, live like a Gentile and not like a Jew [cp. v. 12a], how can you compel the Gentiles to live like Jews [lit., "Judaize"]?"
Paul's use of the term "Gentile sinners" in verse 15 buttresses our observation. In the various factions of second-Temple Judaism, to be a "sinner" was to be excluded from the covenant people; hence by definition Gentiles were "sinners" (cp. Matt. 5:47//Luke 6:33; Matt. 18:17; etc.), i.e., not covenant people. They were outside of the law which marked the boundary between the "haves" and the "have nots."
In this light it is also telling that the gospel which had been divinely revealed to Paul on the Damascus road was at the same time a commissioning to go to the Gentiles (Gal. 1:16; cp. Acts 9:15; 22:21; 26:17). From beginning to end, Paul's proclamation hinged on the destruction of the barrier between Jew and Gentile which restricted Gentile access to God and God's kingdom. Hence compelling Gentiles to "Judaize" was tantamount to erecting the sociological barrier once again, undermining the gospel.
It is this context in which Paul uses the key term "the works of the law" for the very first time. Though naturally the term in theory would include all efforts to comply with the law, it is evident that in practice it boiled down to a few test-cases of covenant loyalty, i.e., circumcision (2:1-10) and food laws (2:11-14), "badges," Dunn would say, of covenantal nomism. The Judaizing position criticized in 2:16, then, is that covenantal nomism plus faith in (or "the faith of") Christ equals justification. Paul contends on the contrary that these two principles are mutually exclusive and that the latter rules out the former. It is in this way that the integrity of the gospel is preserved. To erect the barrier once again (v. 18) is to nullify the grace of God (v. 21).
This theme extends into chapter 3, where the New International Version of the Bible badly obscures Paul's meaning. "I would like to learn just one thing from you," Paul asks in the NIV: "Did you receive the Spirit by observing the law, or by believing what you heard? Are you so foolish? After beginning with the Spirit, are you now trying to attain your goal by human effort?...Does God give you his Spirit and work miracles among you because you observe the law, or because you believe what you heard" (vv. 2,3,5)? The contrast in the NIV is between observing the law/exerting human effort on the one hand and simply believing on the other. This introduces terrible confusion into the letter. In 5:7, Paul writes: "You were running well; who prevented you from obeying the truth?" If Paul had meant to disparage human effort, he chose the least appropriate metaphor to do it; running a footrace invokes an image of strenuous effort.
The contrast in Galatians 3:1-5 is not between exerting human effort and simply believing, but between covenantal nomism ("the works of the law") and the appropriation of the gospel. The Galatians had not received the Spirit (i.e., entered the Christian community) "by doing the works of the law" (3:2b). Yet having started "with the Spirit," some were "ending with the flesh" (not "trying to attain [their] goal by human effort"). The reference is likely to circumcision. The alternative is not "simply believing": "There is no doubt as to the meaning of Gl. 3:2: eV ergwn nomou to pneuma elabete h eV akohV pistewV (cf. v. 5). The true reading is not pistiV akohV but akoh pistewV, and in correspondence with erga nomou this does not mean 'believing hearing' but the 'preaching of faith'; i.e., proclamation which has faith as its content and goal."12
When Paul brings Abraham into the discussion (vv. 6-9) he is not merely invoking an illustration. "It is to be doubted," Howard writes, "that Paul uses Abraham only as an example. His emphasis on the sons of Abraham (vss. 7,29) and the blessing of Abraham (v. 14) suggests that Abraham, rather than being merely an example of justification by faith, is part of a salvific faith-process which works for the salvation of Gentiles....The idea is that the Gentiles are blessed not simply like Abraham but because of Abraham."13 The contrast here is not between "faith" and "works" but between promise and law, as the emphasis on the inclusion of the Gentiles makes clear (vv. 7-9; cf. vv. 14-22,29).
In 3:10-14 Paul explains the nature of the barrier between Jew and Gentile and how that barrier was removed by Christ. The citation of Deuteronomy 27:26 in verse 10 is usually interpreted to mean that no one can obey the law. The stage is then set for the traditional Reformed soteriology to fall into place. No one can obey the law (read "earn salvation"); everyone therefore falls under God's curse; Jesus takes that curse upon himself in his penal substitutionary atonement (3:13). But as we have seen, the law was not a means to earn salvation and the law could be obeyed. Furthermore, Paul instructs the Galatians to obey the law (5:14; 6:2). It is highly doubtful then that he is saying that the law cannot be obeyed.
If we are right about the meaning of the key phrase "the works of the law," then its presence in 3:10 affords us a more consistent understanding of the passage. "All who rely on the works of the law are under a curse" because (unlike those who have discounted sociological barriers like circumcision, 5:6, and fulfill the law in love, 5:14; 6:2) they are not obeying the law. How can it be that relying on "the works of the law" like circumcision is contrary to the law? After all, the law prescribes circumcision and instructs the Israelites to observe such works (cf. the citation of Lev. 18:5 in 3:12). The answer is that the law must give way to the promise based on faith, as the citation of Habakkuk 2:4 in 3:11 demonstrates. That is how the Gentiles may enter the covenant as Gentiles.
The tearing down of this barrier between Jew and Gentile happened on the cross. That is the point of verse 13, which affirms that Christ "redeemed us from the curse of the law." The "us" includes not only Jews but Gentiles, who because of the law were outsiders. Howard writes:
Paul's whole discussion of the law in this section of Galatians aims at showing that the law suppressed the Gentiles and kept them from entering the kingdom of God in an uncircumcised and non-law-abiding state. Consequently, when Paul says that 'Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law,' and immediately adds 'in order that the blessing of Abraham might come unto the Gentiles' (vss. 13-14), his thought is that Christ, for the sake of universal unity, redeemed all men, including Gentiles, from the discriminating suppression of the law. When uncircumcised Gentiles were admitted into the kingdom of God on equal terms with the Jews, universal unity was achieved and the tyranny of the law came to an end.14
In the remainder of the chapter Paul continues to emphasize the contrast between law and promise to the effect that "in Christ Jesus you are all children of God through faith" (v. 26). "There is no longer Jew or Greek" (v. 28) since all in Christ "are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to the promise" (v. 29). The stage is now set for Paul to warn the Galatians not to revert to the old status (4:1-5:12) but instead to fulfill the obligations laid upon them by the freedom of the Spirit (5:13-6:10). In his concluding remarks he returns once again to the issue of circumcision (cf. vv. 13,15), demonstrating that from beginning to end the issue at hand is the question of the relationship between Jews and Gentiles in Christ, not the existential question of "faith or works." This question apparently never entered Paul's mind.
Romans 1-3
Paul's articulation of his gospel in his letter to the Romans is entirely consistent with what we have seen so far. Paul presents the gospel as "the power of God for salvation to everyone who has faith, to the Jew first and also to the Greek" (1:16, emphasis mine). This is followed by another citation of Habakkuk 2:4. Paul's primary concern here is no different than the concern we saw in Galatians 3; the issue at hand is still the Jew/Gentile question.
In 1:18-32 Paul describes the degeneration of the Gentiles with typically Jewish polemics against idolatry (1:20-23) and sexual immorality (1:24-27). We must be careful, however, not to invoke the doctrine of total depravity too quickly. That Paul's condemnation of Gentile immorality in 1:18-32 does not imply the moral degeneracy of every individual Gentile is apparent from his very positive assessment of obedient Gentiles when he promises impartial divine judgment in chapter 2. Paul did not intend to say that every Gentile is an adulterer and a sexual offender. This fact is obscured by traditional interpretations. Stowers writes: "Commentators are so clear about their destination at 3:9 ("all are sinners in need of Christ") that they tend to fly over chapter 2 quickly and at a high altitude, seeing only the message of 3:9 being worked out."15 A closer, more critical exegesis of 2:6-16 and 2:25-29, Stowers writes, reveals the serious difficulties of traditional interpretations.
Some scholars, like Sanders, have seen the difficulties. But by failing to revamp sufficiently the traditional Protestant reading, Sanders attributes the inconsistencies to Paul himself. "Paul's case for universal sinfulness," he writes, "as it is stated in Rom. 1:18-2:29, is not convincing; it is internally inconsistent and it rests on gross exaggeration."16 But can we fairly blame Paul for the incongruities of the received interpretation?
That Paul regarded all people in need of Christ is obvious. Paul was also very aware of the fact that everyone sins. It must be asked, however, whether those facts are the point of Romans 1-3 and whether the traditional reading of Paul's argument can hold water. It seems to me that a renewed emphasis on the historical Jew/Gentile issue in the context of the first-century church makes far better sense of the passage. Stowers' observations in this regard are invaluable. He writes, for instance:
The first two chapters of Romans speak of Jews and gentiles as peoples and not in abstract-individual-universal terms. Salvation does not concern a universal question about human nature. These chapters do not treat the philosophical question of the human condition or the root sin. Instead of an individual-universal perspective of the human essence, Paul's perspective is collective and historical....Rom. 1:18-2:16 is not about sin in general or the human condition but about the gentile situation in light of God's impartial judging of both Jews and non-Jews.17
Far from establishing a universal doctrine of total depravity, the text before us actually assumes a very positive view of human nature per se. God's impartial judging means that "those who by patiently doing good seek for glory and honor and immortality" will be granted eternal life (2:7) and that "the doers of the law...will be justified" (2:13), even if they are Gentiles "who do not possess the law" (2:14). These verses, together with 2:25-29, are fatal to the traditional reading. These law-keeping Gentiles cannot be swept away as merely theoretical. If they were, then Paul's polemic would be undermined.
What is Paul's argument, then, and what is his point? To answer this question we should consider the true identity of Paul's hypothetical dialogue partner who is explicitly named in 2:17: "But if you call yourself a Jew and rely on the law and boast of your relation to God...." At first blush it may be tempting to regard this dialogue partner as the archetypical Jew, but this identification should not be made so quickly. This particular Jew, after all, is a hypocrite who does not obey the law (2:21-23; cp. Gal. 6:13). Furthermore, this hypothetical Jew is believed to be "instructed in the law" (v. 18) and "a guide to the blind, a light to those who are in darkness, a corrector of the foolish, a teacher of children" (vv. 19,20a). Yet "the name of God is blasphemed among the Gentiles" because of this teacher (v. 24). This person undoubtably represents Paul's rival missionaries to the Gentiles, the Judaizers.
Nor should we regard pride in personal achievement to be the Judaizer's principal sin. The Judaizer's downfall is not boasting, but boasting in the law (2:23). The boasting itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Paul writes that "we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God" (5:2). The contrast, again, is not between proud Jew and humble Christian, but between the Christian whose pride is the law and the Christian whose pride is Christ apart from the law. That the issue at hand was not human self-sufficiency versus sovereign grace but the status of the Gentile as the ethnic-religious other is clear from the fact that Paul immediately brings the discussion back to the subject of circumcision (2:25-29).
It is in this context also that we must read 3:9-20. As "both Jews and Greeks are all under sin" (3:9, NASV), seeking refuge in the ethnic-oriented "works of the law" (3:20) will be of no avail. Again this does not negate 2:6-16,25-29 or imply the total depravity of the human race. As we have seen earlier, "doing good" does not imply achieving moral perfection or never sinning at all. When Romans 2:15 depicts the consciences of righteous Gentiles bearing witness to their behavior, their conflicting thoughts accuse them of some things but excuse them from others. The highly figurative apocalyptic language of the string of proof-texts in 3:10b-18 does not negate this fact either; not every human person, for instance, is literally a murderer (cp. 3:15).
When Paul writes in 3:19 that "whatever the law says, it speaks to those who are under the law," he is bringing out the aspect of the law as accuser and revealer of sin, a theme he will elaborate later. Of course we can hardly emphasize enough that this is only one of the functions of the law, certainly not the sole function. But the argument suffices to yank the rug out from under the Judaizers' reliance on the works of the law.
Paul next turns to the real solution, the righteousness disclosed apart from the law in Christ, "for there is no distinction, since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God" (3:22b,23). Years of exposure to these words in Sunday School and evangelistic sermons have conditioned us to think of them strictly in relation to individuals (no one person is any better than another), but that is not Paul's point. The assumed words here are "Jew and Gentile." "There is no distinction [between Jew and Gentile] since all have sinned...." Again Paul is thinking in terms of ethnic peoples. All of this is driven home by 3:27,28, which affirms that it is the law of faith, not the law of works, by which a person is justified. The reason Paul gives for this fact is not that no one is capable of living up to God's expectations but that God is God of the Gentiles as well as of the Jews (v. 29).18 Hence God "will justify the circumcised on the ground of faith and the uncircumcised through that same faith" (v. 30). In so doing the law is not overthrown but upheld (v. 31). This is perhaps most strongly what suggests that "the law" and "the works of the law" are two different things in Paul's mind. The law is upheld when the works of the law are removed as a barrier to covenant membership in the people of God. As N.T. Wright puts it, commenting on Romans 3:27:
This 'boasting' which is excluded is not the boasting of the successful moralist; it is the racial boast of the Jew, as in 2:17-24. If this is not so, 3:29 ('Or is God the God of Jews only?) is a non sequitur. Paul has no thought in this passage of warding off a proto-Pelagianism, of which in any case his contemporaries were not guilty. He is here, as in Galatians and Philippians, declaring that there is no road into covenant membership on the grounds of Jewish racial privilege.19
Ephesians 2:8,9; 2 Timothy 1:9
Significantly, wherever justification is expounded in the Pauline corpus the Judaizing issue lies close at hand. This fact obtains even in the disputed Pauline epistles. Ephesians 2:8,9 is unquestionably one of the most popular proof-texts to demonstrate that legalism was a concern in the early church. Whereas it is true that the text emphasizes the divine source of salvation ("not of yourselves," NASV), it should be asked whether verse 9 ("not the result of works, so that no one may boast" in said works) is really about meritorious deeds -- the individual quest to pull oneself up by one's own moral bootstraps -- or whether the Judaizing issue isn't still in view.
In light of what we have seen so far, it is highly likely that this text is indeed framed in the context of the Judaizing controversy. The "works" by which the people of God are not saved in verse 9 is shorthand for "the works of the law." As such these works are not the "good works" to which God's people have been called in verse 10. That the Jew/Gentile issue is still in view is clear from what follows in 2:11-3:13. "So then," states verse 11, explicitly connecting the thought with verses 8-10, "remember that at one time you Gentiles by birth, called 'the uncircumcision' by those who are called 'the circumcision'...." The problem of "works" is not the problem of human achievement or divine sovereignty but the problem of discrimination. Gentiles have now been included in God's people because Christ:
Has made both groups [Jew and Gentile] into one and has broken down the dividing wall, that is, the hostility between us. He has abolished the law with its commandments and ordinances [i.e., the law of works], that he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross, thus putting to death that hostility through it (vv. 14-16).
The principle of atonement and justification here is identical to that of Galatians 3:10-14. It is dominated throughout not by the question of human achievement but by the Jew/Gentile issue. The "works" of verse 9 are not "good works" but the "commandments and ordinances" of verse 15. The abolition of this barrier of works lies at the heart of the doctrine of justification by faith and (as in Galatians 1) is closely bound up with Paul's conversion and commissioning as an apostle to the Gentiles (cf. Eph. 3:1-13). Even 2 Timothy 1:9, which declares that people are saved "not according to our works," is followed by an assertion of Paul's commissioning as an apostle (v. 11), and false teachers "desiring to be teachers of the law" (1 Tim. 1:7; cp. Rom. 2:17-20) are not far on the horizon (and may we not compare 1 Tim. 1:8-11 to Rom. 2:25-3:20?). From Galatians to the Pastoral Epistles, one end of the Pauline spectrum to the other, the doctrine of justification is tightly bound up with and clearly defined by the fact of Gentile inclusion into God's covenant people.
Conclusion
As the preceding observations have demonstrated, Paul's overriding concern in the debate over justification was not the anachronistic (Protestant) concern of moralism but the status of the Gentile as the ethnic-religious other within the early Christian communities. This conclusion is driven in part by the recognition that Paul's polemic against the Judaizers was part of an inter-Christian debate, not a polemic against Judaism as a religion of legalism. Significantly, however, a careful consideration of these key Pauline texts in light of this new perspective can be as theologically compelling as it is historically enlightening. In a fragmenting age of rugged individualism and ethnocentric nationalism, a renewed emphasis on the relational dimension of justification promises both to energize the Christian gospel and to buttress ecumenical dialogue. Careful exegesis, far from undermining the principal thrust of the new perspective, highlights its strengths.
Endnotes
1 The broad outline of my reading of Galatians 1-3 below is based on the work of James D.G. Dunn, Jesus, Paul and the Law: Studies in Mark and Galatians (Westminster/John Knox Press), 1990, particularly pp. 183-241, and the broad outline of my reading of Romans 1-3 is based on the work of Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, & Gentiles (New Haven & London: Yale University Press), 1994, passim. Though my interpretation is based on the works of other new perspective scholars, however, it should be noted that what follows is not a straight presentation of any one.
2 Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion (Minneapolis, MN: Fortres Press).
3 Frank Thielman, Paul & The Law (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press), 1994.
4 Ibid., pp. 48-68. It may be pointed out that this is not so very different from the thesis of one of the foremost advocates of the new perspective, N.T. Wright, who argues that "the Jewish doctrines of salvation and justification are reflected across early Christianity," adding: "The major underlying difference between the Christian and the Jewish views at this point was that the early Christians believed that the verdict had already been announced in the death and resurrection of Jesus" (The New Testament and the People of God [Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press], 1992, p. 458, emphasis his). Wright argues extensively that first-century Jews believed that the exile had not yet ended (Ibid., particularly pp. 268ff), but Wright, unlike Thielman, argues that salvation was believed to have primary reference to the condition of the nation, not the condition of the individual (cf. Ibid., pp. 273, 300,337,338).
5 "For there was no one among them who practiced righteousness or justice: From their leader to the commonest of the people, (they were) in every kind of sin: The king was a criminal and the judge disobedient; (and) the people sinners." James H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.), 1985, Vol. 2, p. 666.
6 Stowers, Romans, p. 186.
7 Ibid., p. 140.
8 Cp. E. P. Sanders, Paul, the Law, and the Jewish People (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press), 1983, pp. 22,23.
9 Paul: Crisis in Galatia (Cambridge University Press), 1979, second edition 1990, p. 53. In a footnote Howard anticipates the objection that James 2:10 teaches that the law is unfulfillable: "James 2:10 spurs the people on to greater vigilance in keeping the law by arguing that one is guilty of the whole law if he stumbles in one point. But James does not say, nor does he imply, that one sin is the end of the line with no possible means of forgiveness" (p. 93).
10 James D.G. Dunn and Alan Suggate, The Justice of God: A Fresh Look at the Old Doctrine of Justification by Faith (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.), 1993, p. 15.
11 It may be argued that the difference is eschatological: The Spirit enables Christians to fulfill the law. True as that may be to one strand of Paul's thinking, it does not explain all of the references cited above.
12 G. Kittel, ed., Theological Dictionary of the New Testament (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co.), vol. 1, p.221.
13 Paul, pp. 54,55.
14 Ibid., p. 61.
15 Romans, p. 126.
16 Sanders, Paul, p. 125. Sanders' opinion is that Paul took 1:18-2:29 from Diaspora Judaism and worked it into his letter because some aspects of it support 3:9.
17 Stowers, Romans, pp. 107,108.
18 Paul invokes the doctrine of monotheism to argue for his doctrine of justification in Galatians also (3:19,20).
19 What St. Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity? (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Pub. Co.), 1997, p. 129.
This article was written by Mark M. Mattison
