The righteousness of God

https://vimeo.com/239267346

Moo reviews Paul and the Gift

http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/article/john-barclays-paul-and-the-gift-and-the-new-perspective-on-paul

The significance of this book lies in the fact that it is reorienting the debate away from the New Perspective on Paul.

Paul and the Gift

http://themelios.thegospelcoalition.org/article/thomas-schreiner-paul-and-the-gift-a-review-article

Is the "Lutheran" view of justification warranted?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KlujS-fH8R4

The Righteousness of God

http://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/book-reviews-righteousness-of-god-lee-irons

Panning Paul and the Faithfulness of God

http://dro.dur.ac.uk/14230/1/14230.pdf?DDD32+dth0jmb+d700tmt

Gathercole reviews Wright

http://www.reformation21.org/articles/paul-and-the-faithfulness-of-god-a-review.php

Schreiner reviews Wright

http://www.credomag.com/issues/Justification2.pdf

His review begins on p27 and ends on p56. His assessment begins on p44, and his criticisms begin on p47, if you wish to cut to the chase.

"Justification Reconsidered"

http://www.reformation21.org/shelf-life/justification-reconsidered.php

Wright's reformulation of justification

http://upper-register.typepad.com/blog/2013/11/n-t-wrights-reformulation-of-justification.html

Paul and the Faithfulness of God

http://thegospelcoalition.org/book-reviews/review/paul_and_the_faithfulness_of_god

Paul and Empire

Commenting on Wright's recent magnum opus on Paul:

In this chp we get to the heart of the new contribution that PFG will make; here is a full display of the imperial cult as a/the context for understanding Paul’s claim that Jesus is Lord. 

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/jesuscreed/2013/10/10/rome-as-empire-and-emperor-worship/

Now, I haven't read Wright's new book, and I don't plan to. I'm just commenting on McKnight's summary. 

i) It's hard to see how that's a "new" contribution to Pauline scholarship. The Paul-and-Empire angle already well-trodden ground. For some background:

http://www.upper-register.com/blog/?p=230

http://www.upper-register.com/blog/?p=253

http://www.upper-register.com/blog/?p=254

http://www.dennyburk.com/Publications/JETS-Burk-FreshPerspective.pdf

ii) Apropos (i), for those who look to Wright for groundbreaking scholarship, this is day-old bread. 

iii) Academic Bible scholarship (as well as academic theology) is on a perennial quest for newness for the sake of newness. That's a way to make your mark in the field. Saying something new and bold. Or at least make it seem new and bold. 

iv) Although Wright is a theological leader in the Anglican Communion, and even though he has quite a following among some of the laity (both inside and outside the Anglican Communion), I seriously doubt that within the guild of NT scholars, he sets the agenda. He's one of scads of prominent NT scholars. Competition is stiff.

v) But let's get to the main point. In the NT, the Lordship of Christ may have some incidental political reverberations as a polemic against the imperial cult or the divinization of the state.  However, the fundamental reason the NT presents Jesus as Lord is not make a political statement, but because Jesus is the Incarnation of Yahweh. Jesus is the fulfillment of OT prophecies regarding the coming of Yahweh  to redeem, rule, and dwell with his people. And, of course, that will be subdivided into two separate advents.  

Although the Lordship of Christ can serve to undercut totalitarian statism, that's not the raison d'être. Jesus isn't Lord to foil Caesar. Rather, because Jesus is Lord, for reasons altogether independent of Caesar, Jesus can function as a foil to Caesar, and modern counterparts. 

And there's nothing that distinctive about the Roman imperial cult. After all, in the OT you had the Egyptian Pharaonic cult. Same play, different players. The Babylonian state religion is another analogue (cf. Dan 3). 

"By Faith Unto Faith": An Examination of the Prepositional Series in Rom. 1:17 in Light of The Pauline Argument

“For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.’” (Romans 1:16-17 ESV). These statements are rightly seen as a programmatic expression of the theme of Romans. Here Paul announces his central topic for the letter: the message of the gospel with its implications, applied across ethnic boundaries. Accordingly, an accurate understanding of Paul’s thesis statement is essential to grasping the meaning of this epistle. However, one phrase in these verses has proven to be enigmatic to preachers and commentators alike—that the righteousness of God is revealed ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν. This prepositional series has been variously translated (“from faith to faith,” “from faithfulness for faith,” “by faith from start to finish,” etc.), and its precise function within the paragraph is not obvious. Furthermore, Paul’s citation of Habbakuk 2:4 naturally provides clarity to this expression (considering that ἐκ πίστεως appears in his quotation as well), but how this text should be rendered and what it specifically contributes to Paul’s point are a matter of debate.

Verse 17 is presented as an explanatory grounding (γὰρ) for Paul’s description of the gospel as the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes. The gospel is powerful to save those who believe (πιστεύοντι) because in it the righteousness of God is revealed ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν. The inferential tie between verse 16 and verse 17 is highlighted by the use of the cognate verb and noun pair πιστεύω/ πίστις. The gospel saves those who believe because it reveals the righteousness of God “by faith.” Moreover, it is the righteousness (δικαιοσύνη) of God that is revealed in the gospel ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν since the righteous (δίκαιος) shall live ἐκ πίστεως. It is clear that these two verses contain several important (and perhaps technical) terms that require investigation of their usage in this letter. It is also necessary to regard the place this programmatic paragraph takes in the context of Paul’s argument concerning the message of the gospel.

This essay will examine the key phrases of Romans 1:17 in light of their context in the letter with the aim of determining the meaning and the particular contribution of the prepositional series. The various constituents will be considered according to their order in the text, beginning with Paul’s use of δικαιοσύνη θεοῦ. Following a discussion of the syntax of that phrase, the theological import of Paul’s declaration that this righteousness of God is revealed in the gospel will be assessed. Then consideration will be given to the role of the phrase ἐκ πίστεως in Paul’s teaching regarding justification, as well as a provisional presentation of the linguistics of the prepositional series. Paul’s citation of Habbakuk 2:4 will be examined, with particular attention to its connection with ἐκ πίστεως εἰς πίστιν, and then the syntactical structure of the series under investigation will be compared with a parallel text in Romans. The aim is not an atomistic perspective of individual terms and structures but the benefit of both a narrow and a broad lens in exegesis, what is sometimes labeled the “hermeneutical spiral.” To understand Paul’s theology, it is necessary to correctly exegete his presentation in specific texts; to understand those texts, one must understand Paul’s theology. It is desired that this essay is a modest but helpful contribution to that ongoing pursuit.

 [keep reading]

Theological DNA

I have often said, in another context, that if the Reformed Pauline scholars had been in the ascendancy rather than the Lutherans, the ‘new perspective’ would never have been necessary – since a positive view of Israel and the Law would have been part of the DNA of the discipline in a way that simply wasn’t the case.

–N. T. Wright

http://the12.squarespace.com/james-ka-smith/2012/3/27/kings-creeds-and-the-canon-musing-on-nt-wright.html

White vs Wright audio posted

Jeff Downs has posted a link to the actual White/Wright discussion, here:

http://www.aomin.org/aoblog/index.php?itemid=5375

http://media.premier.org.uk/unbelievable/dcc96bb7-7a9b-42e0-86a8-e3d1e1a61889.mp3

White is Right vs Wright on the NPP

In his Dividing Line show yesterday, Dr. James White talked about an radio broadcast that he shared with N.T. Wright, of “New Perspective on Paul” (NPP) fame.

In the course of the show, Dr. White mentioned that he believes he must spend more time on this topic, and for this I’m grateful. Noting that the NPP (rather, NPPs) have been a bridge for people into Roman Catholicism (and through the related Reformed phenomenon, the Federal Vision), he especially points to the fact that the people who most know what they’re talking about, E.P. Sanders, James Dunn, and “Tom” Wright himself, have not moved into Roman Catholicism.

Citing a JETS paper that Wright published in 2011 (and I didn’t get the specifics, but I believe it was March 2011), Dr. White made the point of clarifying what N.T. Wright actually says on certain issues.

In what follows, I’ll try to blockquote his direct citations of Wright, and I’ll try to transcribe (or tightly paraphrase) what Dr. White is saying.

Wright:

The point is not that “the Reformers had a faulty hermeneutic, therefore the Catholics must be right. If you get the hermeneutic right, and you will see that the critique [of Roman Catholicism] is all the stronger. Just because they used a faulty hermeneutic to attack Rome, that does not mean there was nothing to attack, or that a better hermeneutic would not have done the job better”.

Dr. White goes on to say that NT Wright believes that he, and almost he alone, but that he is defending Sola Scriptura, and that we who hold to what he would call the Old Perspective, are not being consistent. He believes that he is defending Sola Scriptura against us.

“And folks, if I am going to be sensitive to anything, it’s that I am going to be sensitive to the charge that I am not practicing Sola Scriptura. Scripture always has to be the norm that norms all others.”

Dr. White quotes Wright as saying:

“On this underlying question, I am standing firm with the great Reformers against those who, however Baptist their official theology, are in fact “neo-Catholics”.

Dr. White then surmises that he is talking about D.A. Carson (?). Following from this, it is always important to remember that the New Testament Scriptures, the original first-century apostolic testimony to the great, one-off [“unique”] fact of Jesus himself, the doctrine of the authority of the Scripture itself is part of the belief that the living God acted uniquely and decisively in, through, and as Jesus of Nazareth as Israel’s Messiah to die for sins and to rise again to launch the New Creation. Again, [this is] a central Protestant insight that has happened once for all, “ἐφάπαξ”, right out of the book of Hebrews.

It does not have to happen again and again.

He says that Wright notes that in the 16th century, “some Roman Catholics were asserting that Jesus had to be sacrificed at every Mass”, perhaps because official Roman doctrine is that Christ’s sacrifice is “re-presented” in the Mass, or if he was saying that was one stream of thought.

“It is true that some people in the first century were asking some questions that were analogous to the things that Luther was asking. The rich young ruler wants to know how to inherit the age to come. Not ‘how to go to heaven’ by the way. Jesus does not answer as Luther would have done. He sends him back to the commandments, and tops it off by telling him to sell [everything] and become a disciple. Part of the problem is that Luther’s question was conceived in thoroughly Medieval terms, about God, grace, and righteousness. Put the question that way, and Luther’s answer was the right one. The fact that the words are biblical words does not mean that theologians in the 1500’s meant the same things that biblical writers in AD 50 meant by them, or rather by their Greek antecedents.”

Dr. White then says, “you’ve got to accurately represent the guy, or he will rip your lips off”.

What follows, now, is really important:

“One word in particular about the big story of Scripture, the story that is presupposed throughout the New Testament: the Big Story is about the Creator’s plan for the world, and this plan always envisaged human beings being God’s agent in that plan, human sin, that’s their problem, but God’s problem is bigger, his plan for the world is thwarted, so God calls Abraham to be the means of rescuing humankind, then Israel rebels, that’s their problem, but God’s problem is bigger, namely that his plan to rescue humans, and thereby the world, is thwarted. So God sends Israel in person, Jesus the Messiah to rescue Israel, to perform Israel’s task on behalf of Adam, and Adam’s on behalf of the whole world …”

This is where you get a sense of his narrative interpretation. Wright wants to talk about “the big picture”, the big purpose from beginning to end.

We [Reformed] talk about covenants, and the concepts that are woven throughout the text of Scripture.

Wright’s presentation is thoroughly Israel-centric, or as Dr. White puts it, “Israel-dominated”.

“For N.T. Wright, THE KEY narrative concept for the interpretation of all the Bible, and especially the New Testament, is the concept of the exile. Israel in exile. That is for him what gives cohesion to the interpretation of everything else. I don’t agree with that, I don’t necessarily think that Daniel 9 is what’s in the background of Paul’s thinking everywhere, but that’s one of the main issues that comes up.”

Citing Wright again:

“The point of the covenant with Israel in the whole of Scripture is that it is the means by which God is rescuing the children of Adam and so restoring the world”

That is N.T. Wright’s understanding of covenant theology.

He notes that Wright claims to have spent more time distancing himself from Sanders than agreeing with him – and he points out that there are as many variations within the “new perspective” as there are scholars writing on the subject.

He claims of Romans 10:3, indicating that:

Paul’s critique of his fellow Jews was not that Israel were legalists, trying to earn merit, but nationalists, trying to keep God’s blessing for themselves, instead of being the conduit of those blessing to flow to the Gentiles.”

Dr. White then criticizes that view, saying “you can’t cut apart the motivations of the Jews, so that they have solely a nationalistic issue going on, and that they do not have a works-righteousness issue going on. It just flattens Paul out too much to try to make the Wright paradigm fit. You have to flatten too many terms out, [and we those of us involved in Biblical interpretation can tend to fall into that error when we don’t think through what all these terms mean], … and so we’ve got to be consistent, and recognize that we’re doing that, but it also requires the reading of particular texts in a very unusual way. In facts, sometimes [Wright] suggests that the reading that he suggests, has never been suggested by anyone else before. And that got us into some interesting discussion.

He qualifies that Wright is pointing out true things; the problem is giving them a proper weight or emphasis. Wrights emphases are far outside the mainstream of historical “weighting” of these texts.

Wright’s suggests that it is wrong of thinking of the Jews as thinking of “old Pelagianism”, that man can pull himself up by his boot-straps, without the need for grace at all.

Dr. White re-asserts that the issue of the Reformation was never the necessity of grace. It was the sufficiency of grace. “And I did get to mention, that New Perspectivism as a whole, and even N.T. Wright’s position individually makes me wonder how he can avoid a synergistic compromise of sovereign grace in salvation. He will say he doesn’t, but I did raise the issue.”

Dr. White believes that one of the attractions to Wright comes from people who reject the “me and my bible” kinds of evangelicalism that is very widely manifested today. But he asserts that we need to know God’s greater plans, and to understand the meaning of God’s grace. “Only God’s people are looking for the gracious God. It all goes together”.

One of biggest problems with Wright’s viewpoint, he says, is that Wright’s “paradigm” in Romans 8 it is a two-party law court: God and sinner, whereas clearly, in Paul’s mind, it is a three-party law court: God, sinner, and Jesus the intermediary, interceding for the sinner.

He says: “This is the newness of the New Covenant”, which Wright misses.

At this point, we are more than half way through the DL broadcast, and I’ll leave that to those interested to follow up with it. But I’ll be watching closely for follow-ups on this topic.

Paul and justification by faith

http://danielbwallace.com/2013/01/01/paul-and-justification-by-faith-the-real-jewish-evidence/

Why Roman Catholic fealty to the NPP is disingenuous

I have posted this as a comment over at Called to Communion:

* * *

I mentioned, just above, that Dunn and the NPP were no friend to Roman Catholicism. This is because its "method" is consonant with the kind of exploration I am making into "earliest Christianity", while it is uncovering things that are harmful to what Roman Catholicism says about itself and its "divine origins".

And I pointed to James Dunn's selection in the Bielby and Eddy work "Five Views on Justification". Here is what Dunn says (for example):

As the Maccabean rebelion in effect defined "Judaism" as "not-Hellenism," so Ignatius in effect defined "Christianity" as "not-Judaism". This is the start of the phenomenon of the Christian anti-Judaism and later of Christian anti-Semitism, which has so besmirched the history of Christian Europe. It was not simply that "supercessionism," the belief that Christianity had superceded Judaism, had taken over Israei's status as "the people of God," and had drained all the substance leaving "Judaism" only the husk. It was more that the continuing existence of Judaism was regarded as in effect an anomaly and a threat to Christianity (pgs 178-179).

Rome, of course, referred to this as "religious anti-Judaism", which it completely distinguished in every way from the "racial anti-Semitism" of Nazi Germany.

This is such a self-serving distinction that it is incredible that people take it seriously, but they do.

You Roman Catholics want to say that because Ignatius spoke deferentially to Rome (the capital city of the empire), that somehow this meant that the Roman church of the day held some kind of primacy. Yet on the other hand, Ignatius is regarded as a key source of "anti-Judaism", well, that doesn't comport well with the IP, so we may safely disregard that factoid.

Dunn goes on to say that "a case can certainly be made that Sanders overreacted in his polemical response to the traditional Christian portrayal of rabbinic Judaism". In fact, such a case was made by (as I mentioned) Carson, O'Brien, and Siefrid in their "Justification and Variegated Nomism". What's interesting is that Carson, O'Brien and Siefrid did not rely on some kind of "interpretive paradigm" to overturn what Sanders was saying. They simply did a better job using the same method that Sanders used.

And so too with the work of Michael Kruger. His intention is not specifically to address Roman Catholicism (though he does this). He is rather interacting with "critical scholars" who hold to some form of remnant of "the Bauer thesis". However, Kruger doesn't defeat the critical scholars by claiming some sort of "foul" against an "interpretive paradigm". Kruger digs deeper and marshalls more facts and puts together a better understanding of what was really going on than did Bauer (and his modern day followers).

True, he points to "divine origins" -- but he clearly explains why he does so (and in what context -- this is to suggest that there is epistemological justification for believers to accept the 27-book canon -- he does not in any way suggest he is offering a "proof" that all Critical scholars should accept his version.)

Beyond this, though, he is incredibly thorough at investigating the things that all critical scholars would investigate -- apostolic origins, the methods of letter-writing, biography-writing, distribution, book production, etc -- all factual details that have deep roots in secular/scientific as well as biblical disciplines -- and he out-does even at a critical level what the "critical scholars" do in analyzing the "messiness" of canon development.

In other words, he only brings "interpretive paradigm" in after he has done the best job he can do at discussing the work critically.

Those of you, however, who won't discuss factual details because they don't comport with your "interpretive paradigm" are guilty of avoiding the heavy-detail work that is entailed in this type of study. You want to claim "infallibility" based on some kind of "divine institution" alone.

This is especially disingenous when "divine institution" used to be a claim based on historical facts. Now that we know the history a little better, and history not only shows "divine institution" to be very much a stretch, but it shows such a thing to be non-existent.

This is where, at least, scholars like Raymond Brown and John Meier and Francis Sullivan and Robert Eno are all far more honest in their methodologies than you give them credit for.

Lee Irons on righteousness

The precis is sketchy, but from what I can infer, his thesis would undercut the New Perspective on Paul:

http://upper-register.typepad.com/blog/2011/11/my-sbl-paper-on-november-19-2011.html

http://www.sbl-site.org/meetings/abstract.aspx?id=20918

Justification by Faith Alone

http://www.rts.edu/Site/Resources/M-L/docs/Nicole_Justification_MLSpring08.pdf