Throwback Post
If you’re interested in the Apostle Paul, you should definitely pick up a copy of Anglican theologian N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God. Though I don’t always agree with Wright (particularly on his interpretation of Paul, as we will see below), I do consistently find him to be an engaging author from whom I have learned a great deal.
A dapper N. T. Wright, Bishop of Durham, 2003-2010 and currently a senior research fellow at Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall
A lot of what Wright says criticizes a certain trajectory of scholarship on Paul that begins with a Church historian and biblical scholar named Ferdinand Christian Baur. Baur taught at Tubingen, in southern Germany, during the heyday of Hegelianism (1830s) about twenty years before the movement collapsed in the wake of the failures of the 1848 revolutions. As a result, his interpretation of the New Testament and early Church history tends to mirror Hegelian dialectic. The “thesis” of early Christianity was Jewish Christianity, as represented by Peter. It was legalistic and backward, and generally not that great. Then there was a Gentile Christianity, as represented by Paul. This had a high Christology (as opposed to the Jewish low Christology) and was generally open minded and tolerant. Moreover, Pauline Gentile Christianity pretty much rejected everything Jewish. These two forms of Christianity fought it out over the first few generations, until the the second century, when Luke wrote Acts in order to pretend that although the Apostles might have had some conflicts, they eventually got along (bear in mind, that Baur dated the NT documents mostly from the second century, something that even secular historical research would not accept at this point!). Acts created the beginning of a synthesis between Jewish and Gentile Christianity, which found its fulfillment in John’s Gospel of love (love being the virtue that reconciles). We see this synthesis take final form in what one might call the “early Catholicism” of Church Fathers like Irenaeus. This, of course, was a betrayal of Paul’s theology and “early Catholicism” for Baur is a kind of Christianity that has lost its nerve. So, the Hegelian dialectic goes thesis (Jewish/Petrine Christianity), antithesis (Gentile/Pauline Christianity), synthesis (Johannine/Lukan/early Catholic Christianity). Bam!
Continue reading “The Irony of N.T. Wright’s New Perspective Approach to Paul”