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!
Though, of course, this clean Hegelian schematization was rejected by later generations of theologians and biblical scholars, the effects of this narrative persisted until the mid-twentieth century. Even reading Rudolf Bultmann’s Theology of the New Testament, one is treated to the facile antithesis between Judaism and Hellenism (especially odd, in light of the fact that the Jews had been dominated by Greeks for some 300 years). Similarly, we are treated to a discussion of how the early Jerusalem Church was more or less a bunch of Ebionites with millenarian tendencies. Paul, on the other hand, taught a watered-down form of Gnosticism, which comes out sounding rather like a mixture of Neo-Kantianism and Heideggerianism if you remove all the bells and whistles of supernatural revelation, Incarnation, and atonement. All of this is finally topped off with the degenerate “early Catholicism” (particularly of the Pastoral and the catholic Epistles), with its clericalism and sacramentalism, which ultimately losses the hard edge of radical Paulinism.
Wright wants to reject this narrative, much as many have done since WWII. And part of this is seeing Paul as a more thoroughly Jewish thinker standing in continuity with the Old Testament. I think is an extremely good thing! Nevertheless, the unfortunate result of this is that it has given rise to the “New Perspective on Paul” by revising the nineteen-century German Liberal Protestant assessment of Judaism, while keeping much of its same framework and categories. (For those unfamiliar, Wright has broadly been defined as being part of this New Perspective movement, along with hard proponents like James D. G. Dunn and E. P. Sanders).
In other words, in the old German Liberal Protestant/Hegelian scheme (with its veiled or not-so-veiled anti-Semitism) “works of the law” = “Judaism,” with its supposed self-righteousness and backwardness. Obviously, this conception of Judaism and therefore Petrine and early Catholic Christianity was not as cosmopolitan as the nineteenth-century German middle classes would like. Now, in light of the horrific crimes of WWII and the Shoah, and the new appreciation for the sinfulness of anti-Semitism after 1945, New Testament scholarship has cast Judaism in a better light. It must be something very good indeed, and Paul was good also, because he was a thoroughly Jewish thinker (so far, so good). But now here comes the rub. If the “works of the law” = “Judaism,” and Judaism is now good, what are all these problems with the law that Paul keeps talking about? The New Perspective answer is: it must be that the “works of the law” should only be read as the “ritual law” and that the ritual law used to be really good, but now it’s really bad because it’s holding Jewish and Gentile Christians apart. So, what Paul must actually be saying is “ritual law divides, but faith in Jesus unites. So the badge of membership in the Church should be faith and not the rituals of the Old Testament.”
This approach is wrong on a number of levels that we don’t need to spell out in detail (perhaps, we could discuss them in another blog post). Nevertheless, the short answer is that the problem that Paul is dealing with in Roman 1-3 isn’t: “Jews and Gentiles are separated, and how do we get these crazy kids together?” It’s: “Gentiles are cursed by the natural law, and Jews are cursed by the revealed law of Sinai. So how does anyone stand as righteous when the Day of the Lord comes?” Paul does of course mention the ritual law in both Romans and Galatians, but only to point out that enjoying Jewish identity by obeying it doesn’t do away with the fact that God will judge people who don’t fulfill the moral law perfectly.
Again, what I think seems to be the mistake made by Wright (and in a more extreme form by Dunn) is that they conflate the “Judaism” and the Old Testament in general with “works of the law.” Reformation Christians have always taught that Law and Gospel are equally present in both Testaments, and that the Church is not a doing away with Israel and the Old Testament, but is a fulfillment of them. By contrast, German Liberal Protestants like Baur, Harnack, and Schleiermacher (for various reasons) did make this identification between “Judaism” and “works of the law,” and indeed did think of the Church as a replacement rather than a fulfillment of the Old Testament people of God. Therefore, ironically, in an attempt to reject this position, Dunn and Wright have unconsciously taken over such an identification. Since Paul has a fair amount of positive things to say about the continuity of the Testaments, they therefore claim that they cannot accept the Reformation antithesis between Law and Gospel. This is because they assume that for the Reformers these terms translate into “Old Testament” and “New Testament,” or “Israel” and the “Church.” But of course, this is not what the Reformers were saying at all. They interpreted Paul as talking about two words of God (again, present in both Testaments), and the relationships that they give rise to, and not about “Israel” and “the Church.”
The ironic part of all this is that although Wright wants to reject Baur, he has essentially reproduced a major part of Baur’s thesis. Nevertheless, in Wright’s story, it isn’t Johannine Christianity (with its gospel of love) that reconciles Jewish and Gentile Christians, it’s Pauline Christianity with its supposed insistence that a better cultural boundary marker for the Church is faith, rather than circumcision and not eating pork. Ultimately, Christianity proves not to be about solving the problem of sin, but about bringing humanity together. In other words, obeying the ritual law is out, and obeying the law of togetherness is in! The final irony is that although Reformation Christians see the Old Testament and New Testament people of God sharing in a common salvation and medium of receiving that salvation (i.e. faith), Wright and the New Perspective in general see one form of salvation (membership in Israel) being superseded by another (togetherness in the Church). Ultimately, this narrative is as supersessionist as Baur’s!
Original version first posted by Jack Kilcrease, “The Irony of N.T. Wright’s Approach to Paul,” Crux Sola Est Nostra Theologia, January, 14, 2014.
Image from P. Andrew Sandlin, “The New Perspective on Paul: Yes, No, and Maybe,” Christian Culture: P. Andrew Sandlin, Center for Cultural Leadership, December 14, 2019, https://docsandlin.com/2019/12/14/the-new-perspective-on-paul-yes-no-and-maybe/.