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A Response to “Not the New Perspective” |
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Professor Francis Watson (currently
at the In some ways, Watson’s
online critique is a healthy reminder of what we can and cannot expect of
ourselves. While we may seek complete objectivity in our exegesis of Paul,
such objectivity is an ideal, something not easily accomplished, and
something not likely achieved through our own efforts; hence the need for
regular consideration of the proposals of others. Watson concludes his essay
with these words: After every allowance
has been made for its [the new perspective’s] genuine and valuable insights,
the verdict must be a negative one. By imposing its own pseudo-theological
agenda on the Pauline texts, the new perspective has hindered our access to
Paul's own theology -- that is, to his complex elaboration of the gospel's
simple announcement that, in raising Jesus from the dead, God has acted
definitively and unconditionally for the salvation of humankind, as the law
and the prophets bear witness. Watson does put his finger
on the interpretive missteps of some advocates of the new perspective (see
his “4. Critique (III): point 4”) when he notes the mantra-like appeal to
Sanders’ work, as though Sanders was correct in any and all regards. Such
appeals need to be mitigated by the texts themselves, as well as through the
works of Sanders’ dialogue partners. Even Sanders acknowledged some diversity
in the material he surveyed (though one may be forgiven for seeing Sanders as
promoting his thesis at times without such qualifications being pronounced). But Watson’s constructive
proposals need a bit of assessment as well. Personally, while I have been
uncomfortable with some of the proposals and readings put forth by Watson in
his doctoral thesis, Paul, Judaism and the Gentiles (Cambridge, 1986
-- proposals put forth when he was a vigorous advocate of an eccentric
version of the new perspective), I’m at least as uncomfortable with some of the
proposals he now sets forth as foundational for how we might recapture Paul’s
actual theology. For example, Watson writes: Paul's understanding
of the law is an attempt to resolve a fundamental scriptural anomaly. On the
one hand, God commits himself unconditionally to future saving action on
behalf of Abraham and the world. On the other hand, the law sets the
divine-human relationship on a different basis, in which divine saving action
is conditional on prior human obedience to the commandments. Is this really the way the
law is presented in the Pentateuch (or anywhere else in the Scriptures)? I
suspect that Watson has misunderstood the way of the Torah. For the simple
fact that even the law of the covenant is prefaced with a proclamation that
God is the Deliverer of his people, the one who rescued them from bondage,
places the law’s commands and demands within the purview of Divine initiative
and grace. On the other hand, while we may suppose that God’s promise to
Abraham was “unconditional,” this is qualified by the fact that not only do
we find post-Sinai reasons for upholding conditions (at least with regard to
those who may enjoy the blessings of the Abrahamic covenant; cf., e.g., Deut.
27ff), we find such conditions explicit or implicit within the pre-Sinaitic
Genesis narratives themselves (e.g., 17:1; 18:19; 22:18; 26:5). Watson continues: The one who does them
shall live by them: that, in essence, is the law's project. The entire book
of Deuteronomy is the message of Leviticus 18.5 writ large. How may Genesis
and Deuteronomy be reconciled? The answer, for Paul, is that the law itself
declares that its own project is a dead-end. It teaches that the one who does
these things will find life thereby, but it also teaches that this quest is
doomed to failure, leading inevitably to the execution of the curse that the
law itself proclaims against transgressors (Gal.3.10-11, cf. Rom.3.9-20,
7.7-12). But this reading of Paul
seems not to get to the heart of Paul's project. By no means does Paul hold
that all Israelites, throughout all generations, fell under the curse
of the law due their disobedience. The examples of pre-Sinai Abraham (Rom. 4;
Gen. 12-15) holds forth hope for subsequent generations of Israelites. Paul’s
exemplary appeals to David (Rom. 4; Ps. 32), Elijah, and the 7,000 faithful
in Elijah’s day (Rom. 11; 1 Kings 19), illustrate that God’s grace has been
operative even in the lives of some who sought to express fidelity to the
law’s commands. As Watson acknowledges, the “curse of the law” is something
that the law “itself proclaims against transgressors.” But given what we’ve
already noted, regarding those who exhibited fidelity to God in their
faithfulness to his commands, it would be strange to read Paul as simply
sweeping all pre-Christ Jews to the dustbin of “transgressors” -- as though
the fundamental distinction between the righteous and the wicked no longer
played for Paul. What would that make of Abraham? What of Noah? And to speak
to a post-Sinai context, what would that make of the likes of Joshua, Caleb,
Phineas, Jeremiah, Isaiah, Habakkuk, Zacharias and Elizabeth, Simeon, or John
the Baptist? What I’m getting at is the fact that if we read Paul the way
Watson does, I fear that we will be putting Paul in the precarious position
of assigning to these faithful individuals condemnations quite contrary to
the judgments put forth in the Scriptures themselves. Is Paul really an
historical revisionist? Simply put, while Paul sees sin as a universal issue,
he also testifies that God graciously has saved sinners in days gone by. And certainly Watson would
not be among those who suppose that it is in the seeking to obey that
one’s fleshly “human agency” is quintessentially expressed. For the thought
of passive or active lawlessness can in no way, at no time, be conflated with
virtue and faith, neither in the Old Testament, the gospels, nor in the
theology of Paul. For this would not be a solution to an alleged “Scriptural
antinomy” but a blatant expression of unfaithfulness. It would reveal Paul as
one who in seeking to solve an alleged “Scriptural antimony” was willing to
revisit some of the judgments made by God himself. What a precarious project
that would be. I cannot but doubt the hoped for success of Watson's most
recent reading of Paul. Watson continues: The law places
responsibility for ultimate well-being in human hands, offering the choice of
life or death, blessing or curse. But it also acknowledges that, through
human sin, the inevitable outcome of its offer is not life or blessing but death
and the curse. In that way, by acknowledging the failure of a project based
on human agency, the law confirms the gospel's announcement that God in
Christ has taken the human cause entirely into his own hands. 'Faith' is the
acknowledgment, elicited and enabled by the gospel, that all this is indeed
the case. It is strange that while
Watson would seek to expose the theologically-invested exegesis of new
perspective advocates, he himself tips his theological hand so much. For his
theological abstraction regarding “human agency” reveals, I would suggest,
something quite foreign to Paul’s project regarding the law and its
relationship to faith. This can be seen in the way Paul himself continues to
set forth “the choice of life or death, blessing or curse” in such passages
as Romans 8. While Paul ascribes to God the way of salvation from sin and the
flesh, and acknowledges that it is through God’s gift of his Spirit that one
may be enabled to walk Divine paths, Paul himself also rings the tone of
human responsibility (read, “human agency”) with regard to the
follow-through. For even those invested with the Spirit are not passive with
regards to their response of lives of faith, nor is the dichotomous threat of
life and death no longer to ring in their ears. True faithfulness, given
definition by the law, has always been embodied in those who place their hope
in the Lord, trusting him for forgiveness and salvation. It would seem that Watson’s
overall reading of Paul fails to appreciate the full force of Paul’s ethical
imperatives as they are applied to Christians, not to mention the attendant
chorus of the threats of death, wrath, judgment and destruction (cf., e.g., 1
Cor. 10-11). In other words, if Paul found the promotion of “the choice of
life and death” essential to the failed project of the law, it is awfully
strange that he himself would propagate it within the gospel context. In
other words, while Paul does indeed proclaim that the gospel accomplishes
deliverance from the curse of the law, the curse of God remains a real
threat upon any within the Christian community who would fail to abide by the
ethics thereof (not to mention the fact that Paul’s ethical prohibitions
of idolatry and immorality are the very prohibitions that hung over the heads
of the Israelites in times past). Watson continues: What I am suggesting
in these all too brief remarks is that the primary location of the antithesis
of divine and human agency in Paul is his scriptural hermeneutic, his
interpretation of scripture in the light of the gospel and of the gospel in
the light of scripture. If so, then his own evangelical construal of
scripture can be compared and contrasted with the readings of Jewish
contemporaries or predecessors for whom the covenant established through
Moses at Sinai remains normative and intact. Paul and his fellow-Jewish
interpreters are all reading the same texts. They share a marked bias towards
the Pentateuch, believing that it is in the writings of Moses that the
fundamental dynamics of the scriptural revelation come to light, and that the
role of the prophets is to repeat, confirm and amplify what has already been
said through Moses. They believe that their message to their contemporaries
is inseparable from their construal of the scriptural texts. Yet for Paul
these texts attest a definitive, unconditional divine saving action, whose
scope is universal and whose glory quite eclipses the glory that once
irradiated Moses' face. That is what differentiates him from his
non-Christian contemporaries and predecessors, who all assume -- in their
different ways -- that the law's project remains intact, and that those who
observe it will find it to be the divinely ordained way to life and
salvation. Again, Watson presumes that
Paul’s problem with the law is located in the law’s demands. He
construes this as promoting “human agency” as antecedent to salvation.
Yet the law does no such thing, we've already noted. And while it may be the
case that some of Paul’s Jewish contemporaries promoted such a false agenda,
and while it also may be that Paul speaks to them in some regards, that does
not seem to be Paul’s primary focus throughout his epistles. For, as already
noted, Paul, no less than Moses, calls both for the necessity of human
allegiance to God and his ways of deliverance, as well as for the human
response of fidelity to God’s promotion of communal or social ethics. Even
so, it is clear that Paul does hold that in his day the curse of the law has
fallen upon In the end, while some of
Watson’s notes of caution should be heard and heeded, and while I too believe
that some of the proposals of the chief advocates of the new perspective (e.g.,
Sanders, Dunn, Wright) need to be revisited, I find that Watson’s
presentation of his own project leaves me cold. I too desire to uncover and
reclaim Paul’s real theology. But I refuse to believe that such an endeavor
can be accomplished in any significant way if our theological convictions
cause us to construct false dichotomies, or to reduce Paul’s convicting and
consoling theological ethic to something less than it is in all its gospel
glory. Watson's brief critical
presentation is alleged to be a foretaste of a much larger discussion of
Paul's hermeneutics and theology, a discussion promising to be critically
postured against 'the new perspective.' One can only hope (though it may be
in vain) that in the larger work Watson retracts some of his most recent
proposals. All rights reserved by Kevin James Bywater. Published here
with permission. |
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