WHILE IT IS DAY

A little more foundation laying is in order if we’re to rightly understand what the New Testament has to say about justification.

Shock waves have been resounding through the corridors of NT scholarship since the late 1970s when E.P. Sanders released his first major work, Paul and Palestinian Judaism. Through an in-depth study of relevant rabbinic literature – like the apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, the wisdom literature and the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls – Sanders argues forcefully that the Judaism of NT times was not the religion of legalistic works-righteousness that Christian theology has so often framed it as. According to Sanders, to see the “existence of a treasury of merits established by works of supererogation” within Judaism constitutes a “retrojection of the Protestant-Catholic debate into ancient history, with Judaism taking the role of Catholicism and Christianity the role of Lutheranism. (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, p. 57)” In other words, we have been reading the NT with the wrong filter, seeing the debates between Jesus and the Pharisees, and Paul and the Judaizers, as essentially the same as those between Augustine and Palegius or Martin Luther and medieval Catholicism, when in fact they were of a different sort entirely.

By contrast, Sanders – who, by the way, spent a great deal of time studying Palestinian Judaism in Jerusalem itself – describes their overall attitude toward the law with the term “Covenantal Nomism,” which he defines as follows:

The ‘pattern’ or ‘structure’ of Covenantal Nomism is this: (1) God has chosen Israel and (2) given the law. The law implies both (3) God’s promise to maintain the election and (4) the requirement to obey. (5) God rewards obedience and punishes transgression. (6) The law provides for means of atonement, and atonement results in (7) maintenance or re-establishment of the covenantal relationship. (8 ) All those who are maintained in the covenant by obedience, atonement and God’s mercy belong to the group which will be saved. An important interpretation of the first and last points is that election and ultimately salvation are considered to be by God’s mercy rather than human achievement. (Paul and Palestinian Judaism, p. 422)

Put simply, the Jew of Jesus and Paul’s time believed that he was justified – that is, counted as a member of God’s family – more by his ethnicity than by his works per se (if by “works” one means moral achievements). Obedience to the law was seen as necessary, but the fact that God made covenant with Abraham, declaring that the whole world would be blessed through his descendants, meant that those descendants, by virtue of their relation to Abraham, must be in the covenant. This, then, was why things like circumcision and dietary laws were so important; because they defined a Jew as a Jew, separate from the pagan world and inalienably a part of “Israel,” God’s chosen people.

N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham for the Church of England and an increasingly influential theologian in his own right, said the following concerning Sander’s work:

It is a measure of Sander’s achievement that Pauline scholars around the world now refer casually to ‘the Sanders revolution’. Even those who are hostile to his theories cannot deny that there has indeed been a great turnaround in scholarship, so much so that many books written before Sanders, or from a pre-Sanders standpoint, now look extremely dated and actually feel very boring… there is no denying that he has towered over the last quarter of the century much as Schweitzer and Bultmann did over the first half. (What St. Paul Really Said, p. 18 )

I was introduced to the view of Palestinian Judaism advanced by Sanders a little over two years ago, and though at first I completely rejected it – because it didn’t add up with my understanding of Paul in places like Galatians, Romans 1-4 and Ephesians 2:8-10 – as I’ve read the NT over again, holding both the traditional view and “Covenantal Nomism” at arms length, I’ve come out on the other side firmly believing that the latter represents the scene in which the Church emerged much better than the former.

Of course there was a diversity of convictions within first-century Judaism itself regarding the level (not to mention the type) of devotion required by YHWH, ranging from the extremely loose to the extremely strict. We can see both extremes represented clearly even within Pharisaism in the schools of thought started by the two great teachers of the Herodian period, Hillel and Shammai (Hillel being the lenient one and Shammai being the strict one). And then there were the Essenes, a group so radical about their devotion to Torah that they withdrew to the wilderness in order that they might keep it more diligently. This group regarded the rest of Israel as basically backslidden. Yet even amongst the most extreme groups, like the Shammaites and the Essenes, keeping the law – and thereby being justified on the last day – was understood as responsive and confirming to God’s merciful covenant; it was not a matter of earning ones own righteousness by climbing a ladder of merit.

When I look at the way Christ relates to the scribes and Pharisees throughout his ministry, I don’t see him setting forth a polemic against a merit-based system and nailing an opposing thesis to the door of the temple. The Jesus I see in the Gospels is, as a matter of fact, more into works than most of his contemporaries (Matt 5:20; John 8:39). Likewise, when I read Paul I actually see him going to great lengths to affirm both the goodness and the ongoing authority of the law in all of his talk about faith and works (Rom 3:31; Rom 7:7-8:4), and I never see him rebuking self-help moralists with a chorus of “nothing in my hand I bring, simply to thy cross I cling”.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. We’ll look at both what Jesus and Paul have to say about faith, works and justification in the days to come, and much of the proof that their context was what I propose here will be borne out by the NT itself as we go along. The basic point here, however, is simply to say that there is a great paradigm shift needed to understand what all these words mean. We’ve been filtering them through the wrong set of glasses for too long. A sixteenth century definition simply will not do. We must have a first century definition. The Reformation was essentially a protest against a timeless system that carried centuries of misguided baggage into Scripture. A historical reading was the Reformer’s weapon. Today we have much more understanding of history than they did with which to sketch an accurate backdrop for Scripture, so let’s go back to the beginning.

Semper Reformanda!