|
|
|
An Evening Conversation on Paul |
|
|
|
Editor’s note: This article is an
edited transcript of the second of a two-part conversation recorded on Wright: Jimmy began the last session
by quizzing me about the phrase “the third quest for the historical Jesus,” which
I coined, and so I’m going to begin this session by quizzing him about the
phrase “the new perspective on Paul,” which he coined. Jimmy and I go back a long way when
it comes to the new perspective, but the phrase “new perspective” comes from
a lecture in 1982 which was published in 1983. So, Jimmy, where is the new
perspective now? And in a nutshell, because obviously we could talk about it
all night, how do you see the debate sitting now? Dunn: Let me go back and set the scene a
little. The new perspective was an attempt to
set the record straight in reference to the traditional or Lutheran
perspective. That perspective tended to operate with a view of Judaism as
very legalistic, narrow, and bigoted, so that what Paul was objecting to was
the idea that you could “earn” your way to salvation – that you paid your way
to heaven – and that this is what all The new perspective really begins by
asking whether this is the case. In Judaism it doesn’t appear that it was
assumed that you had to “earn” your way to become acceptable to God. It was
E.P. Sanders who made this breakthrough, but before him there were many
Jewish scholars, very sympathetic to Christianity, who were quite puzzled by
this presentation of the Judaism that Paul was attacking because it wasn’t
the Judaism they knew. E.P. Sanders started with the observation
that Judaism begins its soteriology with the conviction that The other key feature of the new
perspective begins from an observation made particularly by Krister Stendahl in the last
generation: that Paul’s theology of justification emerges as his attempt to
explain how it is that Gentiles are acceptable to a Jewish God. Prior to Paul
it was characteristically assumed that in order to be acceptable to God they
had to become Jews. But Paul discovered – the early Gentile mission
discovered – that the gospel of Jesus preached to Gentiles was received by
faith, by faith alone. Gentiles received the Spirit, God’s sign of
acceptance; so that was that! Paul’s whole concern, as apostle to the
Gentiles, is to defend this gospel,
this understanding of how the gospel works. This gives a quite different
twist to the old debate about justification by faith. It’s not just about the
problem of individuals trying to earn salvation by pulling their bootstraps.
It begins as a statement of the way in which God accepts all who believe. The
gospel is for all who believe, as
Paul again and again emphasizes. Those were really, I think, the two
basic starting points. Wright: Would you agree with the
following analysis of how all this happened? The mainstream of New Testament
studies from the Reformation until very recently – certainly in the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries – was being led by German Lutherans who
had a very definite law-gospel antithesis. Had it instead been led by people
in the Reformed as opposed to the Lutheran tradition, the new perspective
would never have been necessary. If you take the theology of someone like Ridderbos or Charles Cranfield,
you find exactly the same idea in principle, which is that the law was never
given as a ladder of good works up which people ought to climb to save
themselves; if anyone ever thought that, that was an abuse of the law,
because grace and particularly the covenant precedes obedience. I find this very ironic, because if
you were to go on to Google and were to type in “Tom Wright” +”justification
by faith,” you would turn up many American web sites from the Presbyterian
Church of America and various other strongly Reformed centers like
Westminster Seminary which are extremely rude about the two people sitting on
this platform tonight for having sold Paul down the river and given up the
genuine Reformed doctrine of justification by faith. This is really quite
bizarre, because I think that what we have both done in taking forward Sanders’
proposal theologically – Sanders is really not a theologian, he’s more of an
historian – I see what we’re doing as actually much more on a Reformed map
than a Lutheran map, precisely because of the emphasis on the covenant and
grace as basic, and on the Law from the start as being the way of life for
the redeemed people. This corresponds to Luther’s tertiary use of it, if you
like, but it’s much easier to do it in a Reformed or Calvinist framework.
Would you be happy with that? Dunn: That’s entirely so. I rediscovered,
as it were, my Reformed heritage in all this because I was brought up
Presbyterian. I was a strong Calvinist in my youth, and one of the impressive
things about Calvin is that he sees the continuity of the covenants. The
covenant of grace is the dominant category running through the Old and New
Testaments. Wright: Grand narrative, you mean. Dunn: Well, a motif, shall we say. And
likewise, a very important point: Calvin’s work is systematic – Luther was
never systematic like that. Calvin is able to integrate better what is
typically called now a “participationist” soteriology (“in Christ”) and the
forensic emphasis. One of the sad things about this rebuke coming from many
in the States is that they want to operate entirely in forensic categories.
They haven’t really integrated the en Christo, the “in Christ” motif, which is so
fundamental to Paul. The term “in Christ” occurs far more frequently in Paul
than justification language. Wright: Yes. Dunn: It’s absolutely crucial – the whole
sense of Christian life as being conformed to Christ, becoming like Christ in
his death and resurrection. This is a way of understanding how it is that
Christians can be expected to do good works. This is a very important motif
that a law-gospel antithesis almost prevents you from getting into. It really
snarls you up in your Christian theology and in its outworking. Wright:
Yes. I would just be interested to hear your comments on
this, Jimmy. A century ago, Albert Schweitzer was writing in Paul and his Interpreters about, and
then developing further in Mysticism of
Paul the Apostle, this same antithesis between “juridical” categories, as
he called them, and “mystical” categories. He would say Romans 1 to 4 is
juridical because it’s all about justification and the law, and then Romans 5
to 8 is what he called “mystical,” it’s about being “in Christ.” Now we could argue whether “mystical”
was actually the right word to use, but there’s a great divide between those
two, and there’s an oddity already about that in that if you look at
Galatians 3 and 4, you get all the material which is in Romans 1 to 4 and 5
to 8 scrunched together as though it’s all about the same thing. It’s not a
different set of categories at all; these two belong together. But then
between Schweitzer and Sanders you get much more Lutheran exegesis, not least
from interpreters like Käsemann and Bultmann, for whom
justification (whatever they mean by it) is still the primary thing.
Everything else is just kind of an outworking, trying to subsume it under the
Christian life, post-justification. Then in Sanders you get the same
antithesis between “forensic” and “participatory” categories, which are
really just like Schweitzer’s categories. But I have argued – and others have
agreed with this, I think Richard Hays not least – that if we take the
covenant as the real theological controlling category, in a way in which
(ironically) Sanders never did, then you see that the forensic outworking
(when Paul needs to argue about Jews and Gentiles not least) and the
so-called “participationist” outworking are two different outflows of the
same basic covenantal theology, which is for Paul a new covenantal theology,
a renewed covenantal theology, à la 2 Corinthians 3 or Romans 8.
Would you be comfortable with that? Dunn: Not so much on the covenant as the
governing linking thing. It strikes me that the two antithetical positions
that are characteristic of the debate fail to take seriously passages like 2
Corinthians Wright: Which
implies that we’re telling the wrong story or getting the wrong framework or
something. Dunn: Again, the “story” thing I’m less
comfortable with, because what I see is different ways of presenting the
divine-human relationship and the soteriological relationship. There is a
forensic story, a judicial story, a story of law-courts. That’s one metaphor
which runs quite far, but the “in Christ” doesn’t naturally fit with that.
Well, does that matter? It’s not a matter of synthesizing it into a single
story; these are different ways of putting the same spiritual reality, the
same divine reality, the same soteriological reality, and the fact that Paul
was able to hold the two apparently incompatible images together, that should
be enough for us. Wright: I basically agree with that,
though I think we tease it out slightly differently, and probably I would
want actually a more holistic, elegant view. Dunn: A grand narrative. Wright: Exactly. So, let me cut to the
chase. I’d really like you to tell me how that comes out for you at the
moment in relation to those several passages, three or four at least in Paul,
where he talks quite explicitly about a final judgment according to works.
Now, whenever I mention anything about a final judgment according to works,
somebody pops up like a jack-in-the-box and says that I’m going soft on
justification by faith. What do you do with all that? Dunn: This is right. I get the same
rebukes thrown at me: “Ah, you’re going down the Pelagian route! You’re a
semi-Pelagian!” I just have to say, there is
this emphasis in Paul on judgment according to works. He expects his converts
to do good, to produce the fruit of the Spirit, the
harvest of righteousness. He hopes to be able to present his converts before
God’s throne, the throne of Christ, “irreproachable,” “blameless,” “mature,”
“perfect.” If your only theology is that the believer is a sinner, as much a
sinner until the day he or she dies as from the day of conversion, you’re
missing out that whole dimension. I don’t disagree with the fact that
we always remain sinners, and every time we come to God we come as sinners,
but there is this other dimension of Paul that has to be taken seriously, and
if you don’t take it seriously, you’re just ignoring large chunks of Paul’s
letters. Wright:
Yes. Can I just have a stab at it? Because each time I say
it, it comes out slightly differently. I do think that Paul actually makes a
clear distinction in time between the future justification or
judgment (those are the same word, basically), and present justification,
which is on the basis of faith. I think he keeps those in absolute and
appropriate tension throughout, because the point about justification by
faith in the present is that it is the anticipation in the present, on the
basis of faith, of the verdict which will be issued in the future on the
basis of the entirety of the life led. Interestingly, in the first main
chapter of Francis Watson’s book, he says much about Romans 1:16, 17 and
Romans 3:21-26, as well as some of the earlier verses in chapter 3, but he
never discusses any of the verses in chapter 2, which really makes sense of
how you get from chapter 1 to chapter 3. This is odd because part of his
argument is that you have to pay close attention to the actual detail of what
Paul says. But in Romans 2:1-16 you have a future scenario which could in
principle be said, I imagine, by many second-temple Jews, although Paul
nuances it in terms of Jew and Gentile alike (then the crunch at the end is
that God judges the secrets of people “according to my gospel by Christ
Jesus”). But the basic thrust is that at the last day, all will be judged
according to the totality of the life that they have led. Some have said that
Paul is just setting it up as a hypothetical thing and then just knocking it
down, saying no one can get in that way, so there’s got to be an easier way,
namely faith. That’s a trivialization of Paul’s argument. The whole point then is that God in
Christ brings forward the verdict of the last day into the present and says
that when somebody believes the gospel, they are declared to be dikaios, in the right. Then they are launched
upon this life in which – and I’m totally in agreement with Jimmy here – Paul
again and again speaks about doing things which will redound to one’s credit
on the last day. All those who were brought up as good
evangelical Protestants are tempted to say, “You’re not supposed to say that,
Paul.” But then you read 1 Thessalonians (I heard a paper by Lionel North in Paul is quite clearly not so
embarrassed about saying things that we have done will redound to our credit
at that last day. But the point is that this does not in any way undermine
justification by faith, because justification by faith is a statement that in
the present time, on the basis of faith alone – hence not on the basis of
ethnic identity, moral achievement, any personal civic status whatever – one
is declared to be a member of God’s people, which is why justification by
faith is the basis of ecclesiology. Dunn:
Yes. One of the most difficult things for me as a junior
Calvinist in days gone by was to face up to Paul’s warnings about failure to
persevere in Christian life, his own presentation of himself as running a
race, and having to be very disciplined in case he’d be disqualified, as well
as the warnings to his readers in Rome that if you Christians live according
to the flesh, you will die. One of the five points of Calvinism,
as you know, is the perseverance or preservation of the saints, and I had to
face up to what seems to me undeniable: that Paul brings out the real
possibility of Christians falling away and failing to attain the finishing
line. For example, in Philippians 3, you remember, he insists on his own
account: Not that I have
already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to
make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own. Beloved, I do not
consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what
lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the
goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus (Phil.
3:12-14, NRSV). It’s the same imagery as the end of 1
Corinthians 9 about the danger of being disqualified. He doesn’t hesitate to
use this language. So Paul is very clear on the importance of Christians
being very serious about their ethical responsibility in discipleship. And I
think it should be equally clear that he warns of the possibility of failure.
So final justification, judgment and so on, is going to have to take that
into account as well. Wright: I actually do it rather
differently from you, and I think I’ve just discovered why you’re a
Methodist, which I’ve always wondered. The move against final perseverance
might indicate a more open Wesleyan stance. I don’t know, maybe that wasn’t
the only reason. Dunn:
No, it was ecumenism.
Dunn: Yes. Wright: But in 1 Corinthians 3 (where
albeit he’s talking about Christian work rather than simply Christians per
se), he speaks of those who build on the foundation with wood and hay and
stubble, whose work will be burned up when the Day appears. He says nevertheless
that person will be saved “but only as through fire” (1 Cor.
Dunn:
Well, can I come back on that one? Wright: Sure. Yes. Absolutely. Dunn:
My point there is, as in all these arguments, to take
seriously all that Paul says. Wright:
Yes. Dunn:
I keep meeting people who have taken up one aspect of Paul
and so emphasized it that they either forget the rest or fit it in awkwardly. Wright: Yes. Dunn: On the one hand Paul can speak with
unshakeable assurance. I am thinking of Romans 8, a wonderful passage, my
favorite chapter in the whole Bible, with its wonderful hymn of assurance at
the end. Paul can speak like that. But he can also say the other things – all
these warnings and expressions of concern for his converts,
that they persevere right to the end. So it’s holding both emphases in
balance. Often we’re not able to tie them all together into a neat package or
a grand narrative or whatever, but that shouldn’t worry us. What should worry
us is that we’re not giving weight to things that Paul gave weight to. Wright:
I totally agree. For me, if there are grand narratives,
they’re scaffolding around the building to help us appreciate and clean up
and tidy up the building. But when you’ve got the building straight you take
the scaffolding down again, not because it hasn’t done its job but because it
has. So for me the bottom line is, whether
having done all the homework and looked at all the stories, you can then sit
down with Romans, Galatians, Philippians, whatever, and actually read it
through and appreciate, verse by verse and line by line, what is being said.
If you can’t – if you have to say, as people did for generations about Romans
9-11, this is in square brackets, it’s an old sermon that Paul just stuck in
here, like C.H. Dodd said – then basically you should assume, if you draw
that conclusion, that you’ve taken a seriously wrong turn in the exegesis
somewhere. Paul can have little asides, but again and again, his letters are
very carefully crafted. Until you’ve seen how the different strands fit
together in that symphonic fashion, you haven’t actually done business with
him. We should move on. There are just two
other areas which we promised ourselves we would talk about. We haven’t
actually covered “the works of the law,” but I think we probably more or less
agree about that. We disagree about how Paul sits in relation to 4QMMT, but
that’s a bit technical. Dunn: We do, yes. You miss the point
there. Wright: Well, that’s for another time.
There’s one more thing which I suspect we agree on, and then one thing which
Jimmy and I have never I think talked about, which I really do think is
important and want to get to. First, the ecumenical subject. Ever
since I read Richard Hooker on justification many years ago, I’ve taken this
very seriously. We are not justified by faith by believing in justification
by faith, we’re justified by faith by believing in Jesus. It is remarkable
how many people make belief in justification by faith the thing which divides
the church. Hooker said, very dangerously, early in the Elizabethan period,
that because this is so – and forgive me my Roman Catholic friends, but this
is the way he saw it; the Roman Catholic forbears of the Church of England,
who many in the Reformation period were inclined to consign to darkest
theological oblivion – that they were in fact justified by faith because they
believed in Jesus. But because they didn’t believe in justification by faith
they didn’t lack justification or salvation; they lacked assurance. That was
deeply controversial to the Puritans who were Hooker’s opponents, who really
wanted to say, “No, if you don’t believe in this, you’re not even saved.” From that I move on to say that for
Paul, justification is the ecumenical
doctrine. In Galatians 2, which is the first place we meet justification
language in Paul, the point about justification is not “this is how I get
saved,” it’s “this is how you and I sit at the same table and eat together,
even though we come from different sides of the great cultural divide.” That
is what Galatians 2 is about. And I think anyone who tries to resist that is
simply resisting what Paul is clearly saying on the surface of the text. Dunn: Yes, I agree entirely with that.
Remember that Galatians 2 is speaking of the Now we can understand, we can even
sympathize with Peter, although we read the episode through Paul’s writing.
One can appreciate Peter’s concerns, given that for centuries, Gentiles had
been regarded as some kind of a threat to Now that’s clearly the logic behind
the action of Peter and these other Jewish believers in separating themselves
from the Gentile believers. This was part of the core commitment of the
covenant of the people of Israel, and nothing that they knew of – even though
Peter had been with Jesus, eating with sinners and so on – nothing seems to
have prepared him to take a firm stand on this, to see that this was no
longer appropriate (despite Acts 10:10-16, 28)! So what does Paul say? Paul
gives voice to the great Reformation “justification by faith” formula and
draws it from this episode. “Peter, you are requiring these Gentile
believers, in effect, to “Judaize,” to do “the
works of the law,” to live like Jews in order to be acceptable to us (that
is, in your thinking, to God, because you still think that’s what God
requires of his people).” So this first formulation of
“justification by faith” (Gal. In a little article which was
published in the Heythrop Journal years ago, I draw this very
point directly from the Antioch incident, Galatians 2:11-16: That Paul
rebukes Peter for laying down more strict controls on the Lord’s table, on
eating together, in spite of the fact that we have all been accepted by God
by grace through faith (“Should
Paul Once Again Oppose Peter to his Face?” The Heythrop Journal 34 [1993] 58-65). Wright: I am totally in agreement with
that and I too have challenged my Roman Catholic friends with this.
Justification by faith is not simply a doctrine about which we ought to be
able to agree, it is the doctrine which says we are one in Christ,
that all those who believe in Jesus belong at the same table. I do not
see that as the Dunn:
But I think the point has to be pressed even more. There
is only the one thing necessary for us to worship together, to work together,
to mission together, and that is that God accepts us, has accepted us, and
accepts others on the same terms, by grace through faith. Wright:
Yes. Dunn:
And to make further requirements before we can work
together, can come together, as churches, before we can work together in
mission and service, is actually to destroy the fundamental character of
justification by faith, to call in question what Paul calls “the truth of the
gospel” (Gal. 2:5, 14). Wright:
Yes, it’s ironic because it is in fact an attack on
justification itself. Let’s be quite clear what Jimmy is
saying. Some recent writing continues to polarize justification by faith in
terms of “how I get saved and how I get into a personal relationship with
God,” on the one hand, and on the other hand, how Jews and Gentiles come
together, and the fact that Gentiles don’t have to get circumcised. These are
not two separate things to be polarized in Paul. It is because of the one
that the other is true. They go absolutely together and it’s not an
either-or. Let me move you on, Jimmy, to what
we’ve got down as the last of the things we thought we might discuss. There has been a whole new movement
in the last ten or fifteen years in Pauline studies examining the political
meaning of Paul. I have taken part in this. The moving spirit really behind
much of it has been Richard Horsley of the Now, Jimmy, I have never heard you
reacting to this whole new movement of thought. Where are you on it? Dunn: Yes, this new movement really
emerged after I had completed my main work on Paul, in which I was dealing
more with the theology of Paul than
with the social interaction of his mission and churches, although I take your
point that it’s not simply social interaction that is in view here. I’m quite sure you’re right. There
was a political dimension which is inescapable in all this. We’ve just come back from the west
coast of But there are two other aspects of
Paul I’d want to bring in here. I don’t think we want to push the political so much. In the passage we’ve been
talking about already, namely Galatians, the truth of the gospel is not the
political message so much as the fact that Gentiles are equally accepted by
God through faith. This is the truth for which Paul was willing to die. The other aspect struck me when I did
my work in Romans back in the 1980s. Here was Paul writing to the capital
city of the largest empire to date, certainly around the Mediterranean world.
When you remember that, the things he says in Romans chapters 12 and 13 are
flooded with light. He writes these passages clearly with an awareness that
they are in this situation, no doubt aware that the Roman authorities had
their agents out and were deeply, deeply suspicious of any little groups and
societies coming together. So what is the advice he gives them? He advises
them to keep their heads down, to be good citizens, to not respond when
people try to provoke you, to pay your taxes, to observe the laws. So it’s an
interesting, very strongly political statement, but it’s kind of a quietist
political statement. Of course the subversion is working away underground,
below the surface, as it were, but in that situation, for the little house
churches in the center of the Wright:
Well, I’m happy to disagree with you once again. I would
never use the world “quietist” of Paul vis-à-vis Caesar. I just think that’s
completely out of line and I think that Romans 13 has to be understood within
the framework that Paul has set up. In chapter 1 he says essentially “I
am defined by ‘the gospel,’” which is also a Caesar word, as we know from the
Priene inscription and perhaps elsewhere. The gospel is “the good news” that
we have an emperor. As I said in a seminar the other day to somebody, when a
Roman herald came into town saying “Augustus is dead but Tiberius is the
emperor, he is the Savior, he is the Lord,” they didn’t say, “If you fancy
having an imperial-type experience, you can come and have an after meeting
here and we can talk about it.” They said “Tiberius is Lord, down on your
knees and pay the taxes,” and actually that is much more like what the gospel
is about. The gospel is that Jesus Christ is Lord, which doesn’t mean “If you
fancy a new sort of religious experience sign on here.” It’s a demand for, as
Paul says, the obedience of faith, which is very strong. But then Paul
defines the gospel as concerning the Son of God who is descended from the Jewish royal house (as opposed to
anyone else’s – you know the Roman emperors tried to claim descent from all
sorts of people way back to Romulus and Remus if they could), and he was
designated Son of God in power by the Holy Spirit through the resurrection of
the dead. He is the Lord who claims the allegiance of the whole world, Jew
and Gentile alike, and through this message – this gospel – God’s justice, dikaiosune, is revealed to the world
because it is God’s message of salvation. Those are all Roman imperial
buzzwords. That’s Romans 1:1-17. Then when you
come to the end of the theological exposition of the letter, in the middle of
chapter 15, Paul very carefully structures a catena of quotations in 15:7-13.
The last one is a quote from Isaiah 11, which states “the root of Jesse shall
come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope”
(Rom. Now of course I agree with Jimmy that
Paul wanted them to keep their heads down and not to go in for the normal
kind of political revolution, but there is something far deeper, something
far more remarkably revolutionary going on there. Dunn:
Well, yes, I don’t disagree basically with the framework,
but the political outworking is pretty clear. I think a better example of the
kind of politics that Paul operated with is in the household instructions in
Colossians (Col. 3:18 - 4.1). His “household rules” give very strong advice
in regard to husbands and wives, parents and children, masters and slaves.
It’s very striking that these rules all follow the normal pattern, though
there are some important variations. So he accords there with the insight
which lies behind the typical household rules of the time, that the household
is the basic unit of society, and that it must be stable and well ordered if
society is to be well ordered. That is why, for example, wives must be
“subject” to their husbands, for as the pater
familias, the head of the household, its good order depends on him. In
effect, Paul goes along with that. He doesn’t want to rock the boat in any
overt way. Where he does rock the boat – and this is where the subversion comes in –
is that it’s all to be done “in Christ,” “in the Lord.” That changes the
whole perspective and the whole motivation in a very subtle way. Not in an
open way, as if Christian families operate differently from non-Christian
families, but the whole rationale and value system was thereby so radically
changed that over generations, it was bound to have effect, to make a
fundamental difference. Wright:
I’ve just seen how fast the clock is moving on. We did
promise you some question time. Sorry we have run on a bit, but I hope it’s
been a good survey of a bunch of current topics. Are there questions now
which you’d like to ask about Paul, reasonably briefly before we go to a
glass of wine and the bookstore? Yes. Question:
You talked at length about Jesus and Paul, but you haven’t
faced the fact that Jesus is venerated, being worshipped as God within nine,
ten, fifteen, twenty years. It has been in a way the most remarkable thing. Wright:
Jimmy did mention that phrase in 1 Corinthians 8:6 where
Paul takes (and it may already be traditional) the shema: “Hear, O Israel! the Lord our
God, the Lord is one” (Deut.
6:4, NASB) – and actually weaves Jesus into the middle of this phrase of
Jewish monotheism. You see parallel things going on in
Philippians 2 and in Colossians 1, and of course you also see it remarkably
when Paul takes passages about “Yahweh” (which comes out as kyrios of course in the Septuagint),
applies them without a “by your leave” to Jesus, and does so in the sort of
way which implies that all we early Christians use the Bible like this. When
we read kyrios in the Old
Testament, we expect that to mean Jesus. And so it’s just very, very deeply
rooted from very, very early on. Maybe Jimmy has shifted his position
on it, but I would certainly be completely with you, and agreeing with Martin
Hengel, who says that that step – openly to recognize Jesus and to use “God”
language of him while remaining a monotheist and not a polytheist – is both
one of the most remarkable things ever to happen in the history of theology,
and also one of the earliest within Christianity. Do you want to comment on
it? Dunn:
Yes. I did refer specifically to that point in response to
an earlier question. The features that Tom is referring to are the ones that
stand out. You’re probably familiar with the recent book which came out last
year by Larry Hurtado – Lord Jesus Christ:
Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity (Eerdmans, 2003) – in which he
shows how devotion to Christ (but devotion defined in a very interestingly
broad way) was there from the very beginning, or very near the beginning. The one hesitation I have is – and
this is my same point as before, that I want to take seriously everything Paul says – that I see in
Paul a reservation about the language he uses about Christ. The probability
is that he does not use theos,
“God,” for Christ. He hesitates to use language about glorifying Christ and
avoids using typical prayer language to Christ. I think that that’s worth
noting, as well as the fact that Christian veneration for Christ does not
seem to have been a problem with the Jewish constituencies with which Paul
was working in the way that the Law was. So I’m not sure how mind-boggling
Paul’s language actually appeared then as compared to how it now appears
looking back. Wright: We could go on about that one all
night, and I’m going to bite my tongue and not go to what I would say in
response, but see if there are other questions. Yes? Question: Richard Hays has reopened the
question of whether Galatians Wright: We actually disagree on this.
Yes, go on. Question: The Greek is apparently
ambiguous. Luther translated it “faith in Christ.” Tyndale translated it
“faith of Christ.” Every English translation up until the RSV followed
Tyndale. All of a sudden, the Lutheran translation took in the RSV. I’m just
wondering if there is any discussion as to why the RSV followed Luther as
opposed to Tyndale. Wright:
That’s a much more focused question than the one I thought
you were going to ask. I have no idea why the RSV did that. I have no inside
track on that at all. Of course, in older English, you
could have an objective genitive more easily, so “faith of Christ” might have
been heard in the sixteenth or seventeenth century as “Christian faith” or “the
faith related to Christ,” not necessarily, as in some of the modern debates,
as subjective genitive, that is to say, “Jesus’ own faith” or “faithfulness.”
Let’s see if we can do this in about
two sentences each, shall we? There was a big debate between
Richard Hays and Jimmy Dunn in SBL
about ten years ago on the meaning of pistis
Christou in Paul, and I was sitting at Richard’s left hand as one of his
supporters and friends on that occasion. My own view is based entirely on
Romans 3. I do not claim that Paul must have always meant the same thing by
the phrase wherever it occurs, but I think Romans 3 creates a presupposition
in that direction. Paul says in Romans 3:1-3 that the Israelites who were
entrusted with the oracles of God were faithless, which leaves a problem for
God because God is committed to working through Dunn: This is very hard to deal with
in two sentences. Wright:
Well, mine were quite long. Dunn:
Right. Well, to pick up an older theme of our
conversation, one point would be a slight hesitation, because I hear the
grand narrative being brought in again. “The faithfulness of Jesus” becomes a
very nice filling out of an important part of the narrative, so I’ll just
make that observation. The other is that it’s pretty clear
to me in some key passages, particularly Galatians 3, that pistis language is being used of Christian faith, to use that
shorthand. The problem with Richard Hays’ presentation, as I recall, is that
once you refer one of the pistis
phrases, one of the “faith” phrases, to Christ’s faith (“the faithfulness of
Christ),” it’s difficult to avoid reading all of the pistis references in the same way – the agreed presumption being
that he’s using pistis
consistently. But what strikes me again and again is that Paul starts his
talk of pistis in Galatians 3 with
Abraham: “Even so Abraham ‘believed God, and it was reckoned to him as
righteousness.’ Therefore, be sure that it is those who are of faith (ek pisteos) who are sons of Abraham”
(Gal. 3:6, 7, NASB). It’s pretty obvious to me that this means “you believed as Abraham believed”; and
it is that pistis reference which
sets the pattern for the pistis
references throughout the chapter. That would be one of the lines of argument
I would want to develop. Wright: It’s not necessarily a
straight either-or. There are many passages in which you can see nuances this
way and that, but I regard the fact that that phrase fits really rather
nicely into that controlling narrative as yet one more argument that that
controlling narrative really was intended by Paul. Anyway, is there one more question?
Yes? Question: Just one. We read a lot of the
statement “justification by faith alone.” You’ve spent much time discussing
that, but I felt that it was rather, shall I say, ecclesiastically focused,
in the sense of the ecumenical movement, in terms of interchurch relations or
in the sense of application today. That wasn’t exactly what Paul had in mind.
He was speaking about being all one in Christ, about justification by faith
and saying Gentiles don’t need to have all the same systems which the Jewish
people had in their heritage. I just wondered whether you would take that
phrase, “justification by faith alone,” outside, or with, the ecclesiastical
or ecumenical context, in our own context today even, for the twenty-first
century. We need to come into social, interreligious, or political debate.
Where else does it fit? Wright: It fits all over the place.
The question was where does justification by faith fit outside the context
that we were dealing with it in. I think Jimmy and I were
focusing on particular contexts, (a) because some of them have been
controversial and (b) because some of them are important and often ignored,
the ecumenical one being one of those. But yes, it has resonances in all
sorts of places. The problem with picking up those resonances is that you
really do first have to do justice to the context in which Paul uses it. You
can’t simply scoop it out as a theologumenon and just drop it in somewhere
else and hope it will do the right job, because it may not. So Romans 3,
Galatians 3, Philippians 3, and the other cognate passages are really hugely
important to understand, and there is so much there about God’s purpose to
reach out and save all – Jew and Gentile, male and female, slave and free,
etc., and then from there it goes
out via Galatians 3:28 if you like, into all sorts of other areas. You know
the sky is the limit then, but you’ve got to get the center of it right
first. Dunn:
Yes, it seems to me really rather unfortunate that
generations of Christians seem to have focused on that phrase so much in an
individual, pietistic, “finding peace with God” way. There is that too, of
course. I’m not going to decry that for a minute. Anyone who’s found peace
with God through the preaching of justification by faith will know precisely
what I mean. But as Tom says, Paul’s teaching of justification by faith
occurs in that context where Paul was apostle to Gentiles, so Jews and
Gentiles could worship and fellowship together. I just don’t think we’ve
recognized how important that was to Paul. In Romans, we think that theology
stops at the end of chapter 8, maybe 9-11, then jumps to the ethics, but Paul
goes back to it in chapter 15, and the climax to the gospel is his vision of
Gentiles and Jews worshiping together (15:9-12). And if you take Ephesians 2, whether
you think it’s Pauline or a Pauline disciple
summarizing Paul, the vision there is of the middle wall of partition broken
down – of one new person, Jew and Gentile together – it’s fantastic. This was
absolutely fundamental for Paul to an extent that has been quite lost to
sight. The new perspective, I would say, has been trying to bring that back.
Not to replace the traditional
emphases. What we’re saying is that there is a dimension that has been lost
and needs to be recovered. If we, the Christian people, could really have
retained that through the centuries, what a message that would have been in a
world which is riven with racial, national
conflicts: That in Christ, there is neither east nor west, neither black nor
white, neither north nor south, and so on. It’s a tremendous and powerful
vision and message. Wright:
Yes. We must wrap up. Just to echo that, I can’t resist
just pointing out the passage which Jimmy cited is precisely Paul’s great
summary of the grand narrative, “that Christ has become a servant of the
circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the
promises given to the patriarchs, and in order that the Gentiles might
glorify God for his mercy” (Rom. 15:8, 9, NRSV). That’s the most elegant
statement of the gospel. Dunn:
I have to give the bishop the last word. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
